Photography composition beyond the rule of thirds

The rule of thirds is useful. It gets you thinking about where things sit in the shot and stops everything ending up dead centre by default.

14 August 20268 minute read

An early morning stroll through Westonbirt arboretum. Tried to capture the beauty of both the colour and the sprawling branches of the wonderful acer trees.

After a while, though, where you put the subject starts to matter less. A shot can have its subject exactly on a third and still be flat, cluttered or forgettable. The thirds tell you where to put something, but nothing about whether it's worth looking at, or whether four other things in the shot are fighting it for attention. Here are six things worth sorting before you start lining things up with grid lines.

What comes after the rule of thirds?

The rule of thirds is useful, but it's only a small part of the job. The things that change a shot more are:

removing distractions
separating the subject from the background
building depth
leaving space in the direction a subject is moving or looking
using negative space
finding patterns and interruptions

Any one of those will do more for a shot than moving the subject from one grid line to the other, so leave placement until last. (It's also the only one your camera can draw on the screen for you, which might be why it gets so much attention.)

1. Remove something first

When a shot isn't working, the fix is usually taking something out rather than adding something. A bright sign in the corner, half a branch, a bit of fence, somebody's coat, a highlight right on the edge that you never noticed because you were watching the middle. Whilst you're shooting, all your attention goes on the centre, and the problems are nearly always round the outside. So before you move the subject, see whether something else can go instead. A couple of steps sideways sorts most of it, and patience sorts the rest (the owner of the coat will wander off eventually).

A single leafy tree on a grassy hill against a bright blue sky, photographed from grass level, with two small figures near its trunk. — A lone tree in the Low Tatras from the Minimalist Mission, 1/1000s at f/2.8 and ISO 100 at 24mm. From down at grass level there's very little else in the shot, just sky, a few clouds and two small figures beside the trunk.

2. Separation matters

A subject sitting perfectly on a third with a tree growing out of its head still looks wrong, and the grid won't save it. Separation is what fixes that, so think about it before placement. It comes from three places:

Tone. A light subject against a dark background.
Focus. Shallow depth of field.
Distance. Moving so the subject sits clear of whatever is behind it.

That last one costs nothing and needs no kit, but it's the easiest one to forget. Shallow depth of field needs the right lens, and waiting for the tone behind the subject to change can take ages, so try moving first.

Three Dartmoor ponies in black and white silhouette against a white sky, each standing clear of the others, reflected in a pond in front of them. — Flat overcast light on Dartmoor, so there's no directional light helping out. Each pony still stands clear of the others against the white sky, using nothing but tone and spacing.

3. Build depth

A photograph is flat, so depth is something you have to suggest. The most reliable way to do it is also the simplest. Give the shot three distances:

something near
something in the middle distance
something farther away

Landscape photographers do this all the time, but it works just as well in street, aviation, wildlife or architecture. Autumn woodland is a great place to practise, as a wood gives you layers wherever you point the camera. Your lens changes how those layers look. Wide lenses exaggerate the gap between near and far, long lenses compress it until the layers stack up against each other, and both are worth trying on the same scene.

A road winding up a green hillside towards dark forested ridges, with a snow-streaked mountain peak far beyond under heavy cloud. — Near, middle and far, with the road pointing the way through all three. The road is the near thing, the forested ridges are the middle and the peak sits a long way past both.

4. Leave somewhere for the subject to go

If the subject is moving or looking in a direction, the space in front of it matters more than the space behind. A bird flying towards the edge of the shot feels cramped, and the same bird with room ahead of it looks like it's going somewhere. That's a big part of what makes birds in flight shots work.

It works for more than birds, and more than movement. Anything with a direction does the same:

a person looking off to one side
an aircraft banking
an animal watching something
a car moving through the shot

You don't have to follow it every time. A subject pressed right up against the edge it's heading for can be a deliberate, uncomfortable choice, and that can work well. But if a shot feels blocked, this is usually why, and a couple of steps of recomposing will sort it.

5. Empty space can do a lot

You don't have to fill every bit of the shot. A small subject with plenty of empty space around it gives you scale, isolation or calm, and the braver you are with it, the better it tends to work. The space does need to be properly empty though. If it has a bright cloud, a sign, a branch tip or anything else with contrast in it, you're back to two things competing for attention.

The Avro Triplane, an early wood-and-wire aircraft with Union flags on it, flying small in the middle of a soft pink and blue evening sky. — The Avro Triplane at Shuttleworth from the Negative Space Mission, 1/200s at f/8 and ISO 400 at 300mm. The aircraft takes up a tiny part of the shot, and there's almost nothing else in all that sky to pull your attention away from it.

6. Look for patterns, then break them

Repeated shapes are satisfying on their own, but a shot made entirely of them can look a bit lifeless. What makes it work is something breaking the pattern. A single lit window, one bird facing the other way, one aircraft out of line, one person walking against the crowd. If you've found a good pattern with nothing breaking it, it's worth waiting a bit longer.

Four de Havilland Chipmunks flying in formation in yellow, red, silver and red and white colour schemes, with a small aircraft far below and out of line. — The Chipmunk 80th anniversary formation at Old Warden, 1/200s at f/14 and ISO 80 at 180mm. Four of the same aircraft in a line is the pattern, and the small aircraft well below it, out of line, is what you keep looking back at.

Two quick tests

Shrink the shot right down to thumbnail size and see whether it still holds together. If it only works at full size, it's the detail doing the work rather than the composition. Then turn it upside down. Once you stop recognising the subject, all that's left is shape, tone and balance, and a badly balanced shot stands out very quickly. Both take about a second, and they're worth doing before you put anything up.

What about the golden ratio?

Use it if it helps. The trouble starts when any of these grids stop being a way of looking and start feeling like a rule you have to satisfy, and you end up composing for the overlay. Thirds, spirals and diagonals are all just ways of describing a shot, and none of them will rescue a scene that's a mess. Learn them properly, then try not to think about them too much when you're out shooting.

Move more

This is probably the most useful habit of the lot. Take the shot so it's safely on the card, and then move. Crouch down, go wider, walk right round the subject, get closer than feels polite, and try the angle that seems a bit awkward (ignoring anyone watching you lie on the pavement). A lot of good composition is simply not settling for the first place you happened to be standing.

Practise one idea at a time

If you want to get better at one of these, give it a whole session on its own. Only negative space, or only foreground, separation or patterns, and stick to it even when something else interesting walks past. That's deliberate practice for composition, and you'll improve much faster than you would by reading about it.

Kōlab Missions such as Foreground Focus, Negative Space, Leading Lines and Small in the Frame make that easy, as a brief with one idea in it takes away everything else you could be thinking about.

Shoot itLandscape

Foreground Focus

Put something interesting in the foreground and build the shot around it.

And when you want someone to tell you honestly whether a composition holds up, how to ask for critique that helps is the next thing to read. It's very hard to judge your own composition, especially straight after you've taken it.