Cafeoutdoors.com: Kurt-Composition

Ok
Like a lot of things, The Rule of Thirds is really the Guideline of Thirds......you use it the way you see fit so to speak.

Grabbed a random shot of an Oriole that Molly took.

Pretty much a "bulls eye" shot.....we have our cameras set for action photos most of the time which uses the center point focus set up.

If you have your camera set to Single Shot (Canon), you can move the camera around to set the composition....but like I said we usually are shooting birds in flight and Single Shot don't cut it.

Ok-- I imposed a Rule of Thirds over the original....basically a tic-tac-toe grid

Where the lines intercept are called "power points" because that is where the human eye/brain thinks things look best in a picture

Obviously, to get this into that framework, we have to crop the image. This helps with the composition and makes the subject the dominate portion of the picture.
Cropping to 4 x 6

Ok---textbook Rule of Thirds--- the eye of the bird is at an intersection of the grid and for birds and people portraits that is where you want to direct the viewer's eye.

However, in this case, the green area to the left of the bird, while not obnoxious, tends to draw my eyes that way, so ......

I moved the bird to the left a bit to reduce the distraction....still close enough to focus attention on the bird's eye per Rule of Thirds and by cropping the bird now dominates the frame.

If I was going to print this or use it for something besides demo purposes, I probably would have cloned part of the post to fill up the green space......but I hope this gets you going.

I was looking as several of your bluebird pictures and you were headed towards the Rule of Thirds anyway.

Hope this helps.

BTW, if you do have a Single Shot mode--depress the shutter halfway and that will lock focus, then you can move the subject in the frame to approximate the Rule of Thirds as you see fit.

Again....they call it it Rule but it is your picture......you do it so it looks good to you and have fun

Later