my favourite rule of composition is "make sure the subject's face leads the eye into the largest area inside of the frame never outside the frame".
People like to have as much sense of where the subject is looking as possible, or if movement is happening, where they are going.
It's so long ago I learned it I don't remember where it came from. My dad? My portrait studio instructor? My commercial studio studio instructor, anyway, one of those guys. It's much more important than the rule of thirds, at least for me anyway. For me, the rule of thirds is more cropping technique. But looking through my images, it is important to very few.
The rule of thirds is one "suggestion." I suspect it's the only one a lot of people know. Otherwise they wouldn't emphasize it so much.
My students used to have to hand in a series of images that emphasized every guideline, just to make sure they didn't get too focussed on the rule of thirds.
Be aware of them all, be ready to discard all that don't apply in every image. Notice, the rule of thirds isn't highlighted. It's not special, just one of 16 and if you use it more than 1/5th of the time, your work will be repetitive. There are so any different ones, it's impossible to incorporate them all into one image, but two or three are possible. But, you're always going to ignore more than you incorporate.
The less intelligent students would just take a bunch of pictures they liked and then ask me which rule they illustrated to they could hand them in for the assignment. The smarter ones figured it out themselves. But my favourite picture of my 25 years teaching, was taken by one of the dumber ones. It's like they took good pictures and then asked me to explain why they liked them.
My main emphasis in these exercises was to show them there are lots of different ways of composing an image, with no one being better than the others. That puts my ex-students ahead of 95% of internet bloggers. Favorite? If you have a favourite, you will always be in danger of repetitive work. You want appropriate to the image.
Last edited by normhead; 08-29-2021 at 05:29 AM.