The Grid, and Why I Turn It on and Leave It On
Okay. Last lesson we found our way around the camera app, the buttons and the tap-to-focus and all of it. This lesson is smaller and more specific. It's about one setting. The grid.
Somewhere in your camera settings there's an option called "grid" and it draws two lines across your screen, going the other way too, so you end up with a tic-tac-toe board over whatever you're photographing. Nine boxes. It doesn't show up in the photo. It's just there to help you while you're lining up the shot, and then it disappears.
Go find it now if you want. On most phones it's in Settings, then Camera, then a toggle for Grid or Grid Lines. Turn it on. Then close settings and don't go back in there. That's the whole lesson in one sentence, honestly, but let me tell you why.
Why I care about this so much
Here's the thing. Most people, when they're not thinking about it, put whatever they're photographing dead center. Kid dead center. Quilt dead center. Casserole dead center. And it's not wrong exactly, but it's flat. It reads like a passport photo. There's nothing pulling your eye anywhere.
The grid gives you four spots where those lines cross, top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right. Photographers have called this the rule of thirds forever, and I'm not going to pretend I invented it, but here's what I will say: when you put your subject on one of those crossing points instead of dead center, the photo almost always looks more interesting immediately. Before you've done anything else. Before better light, before getting low, before any of it.
This is one of my mildly contrarian opinions, and I'll just say it plain: I think the grid and actually composing your shot beats portrait mode and filters every single time. Portrait mode blurs the background for you automatically and I think it looks fake more often than it looks good. Filters age badly, they always end up looking like whatever year you took the photo. The grid doesn't do anything to your photo. It just helps you see it better while you're taking it. That's a different kind of tool and I trust it more.
How to actually use it
Practice this on something boring first. Seriously. A coffee cup on the counter. Line the cup up so it sits near one of those four crossing points instead of the center. Take it. Then take the same shot with the cup dead center. Look at both. Almost every time, the off-center one has more life to it.
Same idea works for people. If you're taking a photo of your kid at the table, don't put their face in the middle of the screen. Line their eyes up along the top horizontal line, off to one side a little. Leave more room in front of where they're looking or facing than behind them. It sounds like a small thing. It changes the whole photo.
The grid also helps with something people don't think about, which is keeping things level. If you're shooting a landscape, or honestly a quilt laid flat on a bed, those horizontal lines help you keep the horizon or the edge of the quilt actually straight. A crooked horizon is one of those things nobody names but everybody notices. It just feels off.
The ward directory page
I want to tell you about a time this came up in a way I didn't expect. My dad, he's seventy-three, wanted a photo of an old ward directory page, one of those laminated ones from decades back with everybody's family photo on it. He wanted to send it to his sister. Simple request, I thought.
It took me three tries. The laminate was glaring so bad you couldn't read half the names. I kept trying to center the page and fix the glare with angle alone, moving my phone around, and it wasn't the phone that needed to move. It was the paper. Finally I tilted the page itself away from the window instead of fussing with my angle, and that fixed the glare. But while I was setting it up right, I also used the grid to line the page up straight along the lines instead of centered and slightly crooked, and the second problem, the composition, got solved almost for free once the first one, the glare, was handled.
He was pleased with the photo. That mattered to me more than the technical part, if I'm honest. But the grid is why the second try looked like something instead of just a flat rectangle of a photo.
One caution
If you're leaning in close to get something lined up on the grid, especially something small like a recipe card or a directory page under glass, watch your footing if you're doing it standing on a chair or a stepstool for the angle. I do this all the time reaching for a good angle on a quilt laid across a bed and I've nearly gone over more than once. Nothing dramatic. Just, pay attention to your feet, not just your screen.
Before next time
Turn the grid on today if you haven't already, and leave it on. Take five photos of ordinary stuff around your house using it, on purpose, putting your subject off center. See what changes. ❤️