Better-Photography, Tips Rule of Thirds, Glenn Pollock,

On Better Photography, A Series
by
Glenn Pollock On Making Better Photos

The Rule of Thirds

The Origins of the Rule of Thirds

Text by Glenn Pollock
Photos, Rain Rodolph

When the aliens first landed, humans were still living in
caves, and just beginning to desecrate the walls with their
graffiti. Ignoring the Prime Directive, the aliens decided to
provide these primitives with some important information
[or at least what they thought was important]. Being a very
advanced intellectual, but rather pompous race, they
decided to share some esoteric artistic ideas, rather than
explain indoor plumbing or air conditioning, which of
course, would have been much more practical and useful.
But they figured that, since these primitive beings had
already begun to create graffiti, they might as well do it
with some artistic sense.

The aliens chose to give them the definition of the Golden
Section: “A line divided into two segments such that the
length of the smaller segment as compared to the length
of the larger segment is equal to the length of the larger
segment as compared to the whole length.”

Unfortunately, it came out, “Adjqoeir alrur asfrivn or/atru
nriutahv nvei froif jeeej. Of course this meant nothing to
the humans. They weren’t much beyond grunting in their
communications skills, let alone understanding an alien
language. Fortunately the aliens also provided a visual
formula and the graphic equivalent etched in a stone
tablet. It looked like this:

When they presented it to the humans, the humans looked at it,
then looked back at the small furry aliens, decided they liked
the aliens better, and ate them. And the tablet was ignored and
lost.
Many millenniums later the tablet was discovered by the
Greeks, who had moved out of the caves and were beginning
to build temples for their gods. Having evolved a bit beyond the
cave dwellers, they took the one dimensional line formula and
expanded it into a two dimensional shape using the same
proportion formula: A:B as B:C [A+B], thus creating the Golden
Rectangle proportions of approximately 5 to 8. When they
applied these proportions to their architecture, they discovered
the buildings looked a lot cooler. They also looked around in
nature and discovered that a lot of the really neat nature thingys
[such as sea shells and themselves, even] also had these
proportions, so they knew they were on to something big.
Being an inquisitive culture, they started playing around with
this rectangle by adding diagonals and perpendicular lines,
and discovered some other cool things. Like, if you draw a
diagonal line from one corner of the rectangle to the other and
then draw lines from the other two corners perpendicular to that
diagonal, you end up with intersection points at some pretty
pleasing locations in the rectangle. Great places for placing
important elements of a composition: