Quote:
Originally Posted by miketoll
I'm afraid I just compose the picture in the viewfinder to what looks right to my eye. I'm aware of some of the compositional ''rules'' but don't want to slavishly follow them, they are guidelines only and sometimes a better picture can result from breaking them. Don't get me wrong, a great deal can be learnt from studying the great painters but even they did not always agree amongst themselves and developed new ideas and broke the rules - if they had not done so art would never develop and would forever be fozen in time endlessly repeating itself. As far as the grid goes this does not always work for prints as if you print at different sizes of paper the ratios of the sides varies so the grid and the positions of the points of interests and their relationships varies.
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I think this is by far the more sensible approach. Surely if you put all the effort into getting the composition so strictly tied down you are going to run the risk of getting image content wrong.
As has already been pointed out, getting it wrong in the camera loses image resolution as you crop down the result. Also some detail is lost or corrupted as you enlarge your image to use the grid.
The subjects in the picture are not the only thing that you need to balance. The colour and brightness also needs to be composed so that you don't have too much of shadow or one colour on one side of the picture. No grid can do that.
I also find that it is seldom obvious where the cross points of the grid should lie. Fine if you have one person looking into camera because you can use between the eyes but even that is not always a good choice.
To me some of the most stunning images have been where the subject has been further off of centre than the thirds point.
Should we be trying to imitate the old masters anyway. Photography and painting are two different art forms. Painters don't have the benefit of depth of field to add to the composition elements.
And why should we assume that the "Thirds Rule" is so good as to be that rigid. It was adopted as a rule that had to be followed instead of a guideline. There was nobody to stand up and say whether or not it was right. Every painter just followed the rule like slaves. The old masters were not experts on composition. Their skill and value lie in the way that they represented their subject in brush strokes.