Cell Phone Camera Composition Photo Tips from A Maine Photographer

This past weekend my husband Matt and I went camping to a little campground called "South Arm" in a little part of Maine.  We were only there for two evenings, but the sunsets were spectacular!  I hope to share more about our camping weekends with you throughout the summer, cause the summer of 2020 is a Maine stay-cation for us, and there is plenty for me to share!

But, I found a teaching moment, and hopefully it will help someone out there make better photos.

The following photos were all taken with me standing in the same spot, just different compositions...you can pick your favorite of the following three and I'll share my tips.

1.  

2.  

3.  

So, which one is your favorite?

One of my "most favorite rules" of photography is the "rule of thirds"

Folks who use this rule without knowing it are said to "have an eye" for composition...but the good news is, if you don't have an eye naturally, you can follow some basic "rules" and acquire the look you want.  

All three of the above photos use the rule of thirds, some a bit better than others.

If you divide your view finder up sort of like a tic tac toe grid and place your subjects where the lines intersect, you will accomplish the rule of thirds and find the image more pleasing to look at.  There is more fine tuning that can be done with the rule of thirds, but the basics you can view in this sample.  Below I am showing you that I set the grid up in my phone so it automatically turns on when I compose a photo.

So you can see in the example above with the grid lines that the two different "land horizons" pretty much follow the two horizontal lines, and the canoes and the tree above intersect one of the vertical lines.  

In photo#1 up above there is more water and some purple color from the reflections...probably my favorite!  #2 there is more sky, but two different types of clouds, and even the sky has a horizontal line dividing the sky in two, and in #3 the fisherman falls on a vertical line adding a bit of interest.  (he was moving all about, not necessarily enhancing all of my photos)   

Now, standing in the same very spot I composed two very different looking photos for you to see...so I'll call them #4 and #5.

#4

#5

What do you think?  Pretty amazing huh?  All 5 photos taken from the same spot, during the same time frame.  (Google Pixel 3aXL)

In addition I wish to add, I have not enhanced these photos at all.  God gave me the sunset to work with, and everything you see here is straight out of my phone camera.  BUT, I will add, that when I print these up, I will brighten them up and sharpen them up in post processing software because what you are seeing here is lit up with your LCD screen, and of course it's like a light behind your photo and when printed it won't be that bright, so I will brighten it up a bit for that reason.

Please let me know what you think!  Share something you shoot with the rule of thirds on my facebook page!!  You may not even have known you were doing it!