Taking Better Photos of Your Garden – Rule of Thirds

A lot of gardeners enjoy taking photos of their garden to chart their garden’s progress, to remind them of how beautiful their favorite flower is, or to share with friends online. Actually, it’s kind of hard to imagine a gardener that doesn’t like taking photos of their garden. Knowing a few photography basics can really improve the quality of photos you take. Over the next few weeks I’ll share a few basics that are easy to incorporate into your photos but will make a huge difference.

No “rule” in a creative pursuit is written in stone, so don’t feel like you “must” follow this one. But at the same time, the rule of thirds can help you take much more dynamic photos. A lot of people are so entranced by how pretty a flower is, or so thrilled that a butterfly has landed on their balcony, that they snap away, without a thought towards composition. Inevitably this means that the photographer has tons of photos with a flower or butterfly floating smack dab in the middle of a sea of green foliage.

To give the rule of thirds a try, imagine a tic-tac-toe style grid superimposed on your camera’s viewfinder. Instead of placing the subject of your photo in the middle of the shot, place it where one of the lines intersect. If there is a horizon in your photo, try aligning it with one of the two horizontal lines of the tic-tac-toe grid.

The rule of thirds works by creating visual tension between the unequal negative space around your subject, which directs the viewer’s eye exactly where you want it to be: on your subject.

You tell me, which one do you think looks more interesting. The be centered:

Or the bee placed on the bottom left intersection:

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