One of the fundamental photography basics rule that every photographer should know is the rule of thirds. Once, I chuckled when viewing an instructional video tutorial about learning photography when the instructor advised us to avoid putting the subject dead centre in the picture frame because it is deadly! Truly this is the rule to live by most of the time!

Why not place the subject dead centre? It is well balance. When you take a photo of your love one, you could see some background framing the subject. Head to toes in perfect symmetry. Nothing much wrong with that. But therein lays the matter with that picture. It is too balance. This translates to: boring!

Hence placing the subject off-centre would be the better idea for making a more interesting photograph. As was said, dead centre is deadly!

Basic photography idea rule of thirds is simply imagining within the viewfinder frame of a digital SLR camera by dividing the scene into a tic-tac-toe like lines as a guide for subject placement. For the compacts, you could switch on the grid lines to assist in the placement of the subject.

Place the subject such as a person approximately on the line itself and take the picture. You may also create a more complicated structure by looking out for horizontal lines like the horizon, buildings, roads, etc and placing them in thirds together with the subjects to create a criss-cross of thirds within the picture photo.

By breaking the symmetry, you can achieve some very interesting photography composition with the lines drawing the eye to the subject matter.