It’s Tuesday Tidbit day! Yay! Hooray! (Man, I’m on a “poet and didn’t know it” roll today: earlier I called that plastic thing on my desk that holds papers and folders the “folder holder”.)
ANYway, today’s tidbit is short and to the point: people like to see things that utilize odd numbers. Visually, you can use this in a few ways: first, with the rule of thirds; second, by utilizing triangles when posing people; and third (don’t you love that there are THREE reasons to use odd numbers? I do.), by including an odd number of subjects in your image (three people instead of two, three columns instead of two, etc).
The most interesting explanation I’ve heard for this is that our brains naturally want to pair up similar objects and if you have an odd number of those objects, the brain can’t pair anything up; therefore our eyes keep moving around the composition, from one object to the next, in the attempt to find the pairs. Ultimately, it’s this eye movement that you’re after because it keeps the composition dynamic and engaging for the viewer.
Whether or not that explanation holds water in the scientific community….meh, doesn’t matter to me. All I know is I like me some photos that have odd elements in them… 
Happy shooting from Vantage!
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