Okay, so let's have a look at some basic composition tips, we're going to explore the rule of thirds. And also, whenever we take an image always allow what I call the image room to brief. So always, whenever you got your perfect crop, just zoom out a tiny bit of step back a tiny bit, if you're using a prime, what that's gonna do is just going to give the image room to breathe, and then you've got some cropping room. If your composition is slightly off the top tip there, always give your composition, your frame room to breathe, so you can always come in a little bit. If you're going really tight, you can't come out afterwards. So if you come in and allow a bit of room you can always come back in afterwards.
But let's just have a look at the rule of thirds. Now, I do have a full in depth course on the art of composition within photography. What I want to show you in this is the basic rule of thirds. And how we might apply that. But if you would really like to learn more how the masters of photography, compose their images, what some of the basic rules and principles we can use to create really compelling composition, I strongly suggest you take the time to go and have a look at that course. But let's get on let's have a look at the rule of thirds.
Now with the rule of thirds, we position our subject a third of the way into the frame. So as you can see, in this image, he's a third of the way into the frame, approximately, and we've drawn the vertical line down through his nose to illustrate the rule of thirds. So that is a classic rule of thirds, upper body sharp. Now you can see the space have given him at the top is more rule of quarters. If I go to the next one, this is classic rule of thirds through both angles. And as you can see, that's gonna create some interest, we'll leave some space.
On the other side, we've created an asymmetrical composition, which is very appealing, a lot of people will take their portraits and stick the person right in the middle. worst thing you can do, always try and use the ruler first as a basic starting place. I use the role of fourths fifths I do further frame I do lots of different ways of cutting images and composing and breaking the rule of thirds. Like I said, again, check out my composition course if you want to know a lot more about that. But in this instance, I just want to teach you the basics and give you something to get going so you can create portraiture that gets you out of the blocks really quickly. So this is a standard rule of thirds commercial portrait.
This is an executive portrait, so we wanted to create a certain look. What I've done here as you can see, I've used open loop lighting on this so she got strong open loop I'm probably a little bit hot on her cheeks here probably should have come down a tiny bit but I didn't want to lose that shape I did like the highlight sitting there. And then we've obviously got the shadow underneath because we're using this open loop so that standard rule of thirds are stuck or in a third and it's very interesting when we do this with our subjects. Again another rule of thirds this was a candid portray. This is beauty lighting coming down from the top and you can see the butterfly and under those so this is butterfly lighting. You set a nice bit of light coming down.
And what I did with this one was basically I had my flash on my camera. This was in a conference room. These are candids it was a meeting I didn't have long had to be really quick. So what I did was about my flash up at the ceiling, my ceiling became my light source and I got this butterfly lighting, this beauty, very even beauty shot from above. And I quite liked this image because she had quite a contrast between her eyes and her skin tone. But that is again the rule of thirds.
You can see the third is coming down between the eyes and we've got a pleasing tight headshot.