Rule-of-Thirds or Centered? A study in preference in photo composition

The Rule of Thirds is a well known heuristic in photo composition. The professional photography community both uses it and derides it. We report on an experiment to test the validity of the Rule of Thirds in the simplest case: composition of a single object. Our results show that our participants overwhelmingly preferred a centered object in the image to one positioned according to the Rule of Thirds. We speculate why this is so and point to other research that addresses how we can take advantage of this “salient centeredness”.