The rule of thirds is the first thing anyone is taught about composition, and it is also the first thing more advanced people tell you to ignore. The justifications I find are either vague appeals to the golden ratio or simply that it looks better.
Is there anything behind it, or is it a beginner heuristic that got repeated into a law?
Accepted Answer
It is a heuristic, and a genuinely useful one, standing in for a real principle that is harder to teach.
The real principle is that dead centre placement tends to be static, and that a composition usually benefits from tension between the subject and the space around it. Thirds is a fast way to get off centre without thinking, and it works far more often than centring does for a beginner.
The golden ratio justification is the weak part. The rule of thirds is not the golden ratio, the numbers are different, and the attempts to find phi in old master paintings mostly involve drawing the rectangle after choosing where to put it.
So: use it as a default, drop it when you have a reason. It is scaffolding rather than a law.
Worth adding when centring is right, since the reaction against thirds often goes too far the other way.
Symmetry is powerful when the subject is formal, still or confrontational. Portraits looking straight at the viewer, architecture, anything meant to feel deliberate and composed rather than caught.
Wes Anderson built a career on centring. The failure is not centring, it is centring by accident because the subject was put in the middle of the viewfinder without a decision being made.
Also worth separating placement from balance. You can follow thirds exactly and still produce a lopsided image if the weight of tone and colour all sits on one side.
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