Rule of Thirds ~ Synchronicities

Hi everyone,

I have signed up to create a slide show for my Tae Kwon Do club's upcoming 40th anniversary. My goal is to write about it for this blog along the way. Last weekend, I gathered about 50 possible songs, which I need to whittle down to one or two. I have also been working on cleaning up the photos. I started with approximately 1500 pictures and after some heavy deleting, have the number down to about 800. Obviously that is still way too many...


One of the problems I have encountered is that there is not a lot of visual stimulation in many of the photos because we are all wearing our white uniforms, in basically a white room with white ceilings. I thought maybe if I could crop some photos to be a little more interesting, it would help spice things up a bit.

I am going to try to crop some photos following 9-balance or the rule of thirds that I have recently learned from Caesar...

I really like the visual grid of nine blocks because it applies to many other areas of life (not just photos). The first thing I thought of when I saw the nine square grid overlaid on the photo on wiki, was a poi or hoop (flow arts) learning technique, that I heard about at Hoop Camp this year from Danielle Odette. This technique is called the nine square theory and is developed by poi artist, Charlie Cushing, in a series of YouTube videos. Here is the first one.

I tend to get very excited when I find out that seemingly unrelated things are, in fact, related! When you are learning flow arts, one of the way to understand the space around you is using this grid. The middle box is the box that is directly in front of you, your mid section. The rest of the grid expands to your left and right, the bottom row is the three squares that line up with the floor/your feet. The top row is the three squares that line up above your head when you raise your arms.

Now picture that grid in three dimensions, and you have a cube! Reference the Spin Cube which debuted at last year's Spin Summit in Colorado. Inspiration for this interactive artwork came from Sacred Geometry; another topic which I would like to delve into.

And now that I'm thinking in cubes, my mind has leaped to Rubik's Cubes and sugar cubes and all kinds of cubes! I also love how there are circles inside of the cubes. Something about combining the smooth circle of the hoop with sharp edges of cubes, makes me think of yin/yang, dichotomies, and how nicely opposite seeming things can complement each other.

There are also more fantastical connections to the rule of thirds starting with the Golden Ratio, that I would like to explore further also.

Spin on, my friends.
 ~ Minerva