“Great. So let’s cover the basics, and then we can roll.”
Lark leaned forward and placed her camera in my hands. I held it awkwardly, so after a pause she positioned my fingers where they should go, lingering in a way that made me feel uneasy. I couldn’t exactly pull my hands away, at least not without dropping the camera, so I was relieved when she finally finished and sat back in her chair.
After that, she gave me a quick tour of her camera, showing me how it worked and teaching me the terms for its various parts, such as the viewfinder and the lens. Once I felt confident enough to give it a try, she had me snap a picture of her there at the table, and then she brought it back up onto the little screen and used it to point out the “basics of composition,” as she called it. It was a lot to take in, but she was a surprisingly good teacher, leading me down the path of knowledge in just the right order.
“Let’s go,” she said finally. “I’ll talk as we walk.”
I paid the bill, insisting it was my turn this time, and we set out.
“The easiest way to compose a photo is to use the rule of thirds,” she said as we made our way down the sidewalk. “Think of your image as a rectangle divided into nine equal-sized segments. You know, mentally draw two vertical and two horizontal lines across it so that you have nine squares total.”
“Okay. I can see that.”
“Good. The most important elements in your scene should either fall along these lines or, better yet, at the points where they intersect. When we look at a picture, our eyes are naturally drawn there, so if you use them in your composition, you can pull us into the picture. You know how some pics are awesome and some are boring? The awesome ones are almost always composed along those lines. Here.”
Lark reached for the camera and knelt down on the sidewalk. She pointed the lens toward a flowering vine on a white picket fence. She snapped two photos and then got back to her feet, pressing a button on the camera and then handing it to me.
“See? First look at this one,” she said, showing me an image of the flower at the middle of the screen. It looked okay to me until she pressed a button to show the next picture, where the flower was instead located a little to the left, its bloom tilting vaguely toward the center.
“Which image is better? The first or the second?”
“I don’t know enough yet to say.”
“Just in your gut, Ty. Which one do you find more pleasing?”
“Okay, the second one,” I admitted. “But I don’t know why.”
She grinned. “The rule of thirds is why.”
She pointed out the placement of the stem and the bloom, and I nodded as understanding slowly began to dawn.
“Got it? Okay. Now, look how I used the invisible horizontal lines to draw your eye to what is keeping the flower tethered. The fence. See? The vine wants to venture out on its own, but it needs the fence to hold it up. And the fence isn’t going anywhere.”
I pulled my gaze from the little image on the screen to look at her face. “You saw all that when you took that photo?”
“You have to train your eye to see past the obvious. Here. You try. Look at that house across the street. What is your eye drawn to?”
I turned to look at the blue-and-white house across the narrow street from us. It was well-kept and festooned with half a dozen hanging geraniums. Lacy curtains hung in all the windows, and a striped cat sat in one of the sills.
“The cat, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“The cat.”
“Zoom in on the cat and then pull out. Imagine those nine squares.”
I tried to obey. But I couldn’t see the nine squares or anything else remarkable.
“See them?”
“Not really.”
She took the camera from me, fiddled with it, and then handed it back. Now on the little screen was a nine-square grid overlay.
“Cool.”
“Don’t get overly dependent on it.”
I tried again. I zoomed in on the cat so that he filled the right-hand side and pressed the shutter. I handed the camera to Lark and she pulled up the image.
“Okay. So what is this?”
I shrugged. “It’s a picture of a cat.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else. It’s just a picture of a cat.”
“That’s my point. Look at the house again. What do you see?”
I sighed. “Blue and white paint, a door, geraniums, windows, lacy curtains, and a cat.”
“How many windows?”
I counted them. Five on the first floor. Four on the second. “Nine that we can see.”
“And how many cats?”
“One. What are you getting at?”