Practice question · True or false
The rule of thirds first appears in print in John Thomas Smith's Remarks on Rural Scenery of 1797.
Hints
- It predates photography by four decades.
- Smith was writing about landscape drawing, not cameras.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and the date matters. The rule is an eighteenth-century recommendation for dividing a landscape drawing into thirds of light and shade, adopted wholesale by photography forty years before photography existed to test it. Its authority is customary, not perceptual.
Practise Form and Composition
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