maybe the rule of 1/3s was applied to way more than it should be, but i don't think it's one to throw the baby out with the bathwater though. again, it's a good starter rule. once you get skilled enough to start composing shots without needing a check list of rules to apply, you'll see that some of those starter rules getting broken regularly.
a common use of thirds is in graphics use of lower thirds. it's just enough room without being too much. lower quaters would be small. lower halves would be too much. centering your subject in the first 2/3 and leaving the remaing third as looking room isn't bad aesthetically.
so maybe how you are interpretting the ROT is different than how i use it, but you definitely seem to have a grudge
Yup. I guess I do. Perhaps I overstated my feelings, but as an art and design teacher such non-truths are the bane of my life.
Almost all 2D aesthetic images (paintings, art photographs or page layouts) feature a region of interest (ROI) sometimes called the point of focus or the center of attention. Indeed, it is difficult to construct an aesthetic image that does not.
The so-called rule of thirds states that this ROI is best located one third across the vertical and horizontal axis.
However, the actual; truth is more complex and more interesting:
1. The horizontal axis ratio is not 1:2 but closer to 1.618. In other words, the golden ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio [1]. For many purposes, one third is close enough to the golden ratio. However, in practice artists/designers tend to actively avoid exact fractions (third, half, quarter, seventh etc).
2. There is a difference between the placement on the vertical axis to that of the horizontal axis. The vertical axis seems to be tighter towards the edge (the bottom edge in a painting, the top edge in a flat design).
3. Mysteriously, there is a slight favoring of the left side over the right. This seems to have something to do with writing direction [2].
My own small-scale field research supports these observations (on 31 art students), as well as the work of a few others (below).
On a personal note... one reason I like lurking in Hacker News is for the precision of thinking that computer and software engineers exhibit. In my own field (fine art) 'received wisdom' is often taken as lore. These non-truths are harder to kill than vampires. Examples:
- Red recedes over blue (in a FG/BG pairing, one will always recede, but which would depend upon which red and blue you employ and how they are used).
- The complementary of red is green (yes it is the perceptual complementary in RYB space, but the mix-to-neutral complementary in RGB space is cyan).
- That the Pointillist painter Seurat employed optical mixing of primaries by placing them in close proximity, like a CMYK printer (he simply did not... there were other reasons he favored small dabs of paint in close proximity).
... I could go on.
[1] Amirshahi, S.A., Hayn - Leichsenring, G.U., Denzler, J., Redies, C.: Evaluating the rule of thirds in photographs and paintings. Art Percept. 2 , 163 – 182 (2014)
[2] Chahboun, S., Flumini, A., Gonzàlez, C. P., McManus, I. C., & Santiago, J.: Reading and
Writing Direction Effects on the Aesthetic Appreciation of Photographs (2016)
a common use of thirds is in graphics use of lower thirds. it's just enough room without being too much. lower quaters would be small. lower halves would be too much. centering your subject in the first 2/3 and leaving the remaing third as looking room isn't bad aesthetically.
so maybe how you are interpretting the ROT is different than how i use it, but you definitely seem to have a grudge