Digital Wedding Photography: Capturing Beautiful Memories, Second Edition

Chapter 5: Composing Your Art

The rules of composition are designed to help maintain a tight sense of law and order in the art world. Just kidding! There aren't any rules to creating art, nor are there any rules to creating wedding images. However, if you happen to be a beginning photographer, having some guidelines can be helpful in your quest to become an artist. The composition “rules” discussed in this chapter are really just guidelines for the beginner. As you master the basics, you develop a feel for when you can bend or break the rules and still create images that work.

If you truly analyze how you feel when you view an image, you might come up with all these rules on your own, because when it comes down to it, the feel of an image is what is important. In fact, all of the rules or guidelines I discuss are based on gut feelings that the average viewer commonly feels. When viewers see an image that breaks the rules, it frequently creates a feeling of distress and they can almost immediately tell you that they don't like the image even if they can't tell you why. The opposite is true for images that follow the rules. Viewers can sense that the image has a natural balance to it and they feel comfortable looking at it. They may not have any idea which rules it follows; they just know it is pleasant to look at and they like it.

The Rule of Thirds

The Rule of Thirds is perhaps ...