Seamen’s House – Rule of thirds

Rule of Third or a principle of the Golden ratio is a powerful tool to make your photos dynamic and interesting for human eyes. In this post I tell about this snapshot and how to use a Rule of Third to make better pictures.

Location

Constance – Lake Constance is a small German city near Switzerland’s border. This very cozy place located directly on Lake Constance and in good weather you can see the Alps very good on the horizon. It was around noon and I had only 50mm lens on my camera. I just wanted to make some abstract shots. During the day, the light very strongly to photograph landscapes, so I focused more on the little things. We, me and my wife, just walking along the shore near docks and I saw this beautiful building. I suspect that this is an old lighthouse.

Composition

I wanted to show dynamic in this picture. I wish that people look not only at the building but also see the ambience around. In my head I’ve shared the screen with four lines into nine blocks. The lighthouse I have placed vertically on the left line and the jetty on the bottom line. So I had enough room below for water and above for the sky.

Tip 1: Set a object not in the center, if this is not necessary

Questions? Post your Questions under this post.

Equipment and Settings

For this shot you don’t need expensive equipment. I carried my two years old Canon 600D with Canon EF 1.8 / 50 II Lens for $100. It would also suffice any camera with manual settings. This Image I took in AV-Mode with the following settings:

• Shutter speed: 1/1250
• Aperture: f 5
• ISO: 100

I set ISO to 100 (lowest value on my camera) and aperture to 5, so the background is sharp enough. My camera set the shutter speed automatically to 1/1250.

Tip 2: For beautiful images you don’t need ultra expensive equipment

Questions? Post your Questions under this post.

Post-Processing

Using RAW format has several advantages. In post-production I could choose better colors and make the sky colors much saturator. In order to make the sky as on the result screen I had to sit down the luminance of blue tone in Lightroom. This trick I discovered by chance while trying various settings. In this post I won’t explain how to use Lightroom. This is very extensively. I post my settings for this image below.

Tip 3: RAW-Format is much better for post-processing

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Result

This is a result image in full size. All rights reserved. When using this image, please link to this post and qoute the author.