The golden ratio does not have magical properties. It isn’t “a proportion that is absolutely elegant in it’s mathematical beauty”, and using it will not make one’s photographs wonderful. It’s merely a number that, like other numbers, shows up in nature in a few places; unfortunately, it was caught up in mysticism and nonsense for quite a while, and that’s persisted into the modern day.

Amusingly, the Fibonacci spiral the author uses, and labels with “The Golden Ratio” is does not have the correct proportions, as the ratio of consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence only trends toward the golden ratio. The ratio used in all of the pictures is actually 0.598. As can be seen, with enough handwaving, one can make justify most any rule, and the rule presented here has no more or less validity than the rule of thirds—both are lazy shams.