Learning Photography Composition: From Rules to Vision
If you stick with photography long enough, composition becomes the thing you keep coming back to. Many a new photographer will spend time researching equipment, editing techniques, locations or even technical aspects of photography but they will keep returning to composition.
Now, like many other aspects of photography good composition comes with experience, but you can also learn a lot by admiring your photographic influences. We can pick up a book, turn the pages and ask ourselves what is it we like and admire about these photos.
That said, without knowing what you’re looking for it can be a bit challenging to break down an image. And it’s at this stage a photographer might turn to YouTube, books, or ebooks on composition techniques… Pandora’s box is opened, and you grapple desperately trying to understand what it all means.
I’ve been through this learning curve twice, and I noticed something: composition advice tends to split into two camps, ‘the rules’ camp and the ‘perception and flow’ camp. What do I mean? Well take a look at the following diagram where I list some of the things that each camp preach:
| Rules camp | Perception and flow camp |
|---|---|
| Rule of thirds | Visual weight |
| Golden ratio | Flow |
| Diagonals | Balance |
| Leading lines | Feeling (tension vs calm) |
This confused me, more than it maybe should. When I first learnt photography, there was a lot of talk about leading lines, rule of thirds, diagonals when attending photograph reviews at the local photography club. There were video’s of award winning photojournalists listing out all these rules, and they were clearly gifted, and very well respected. Yet, there are photos I took, that I saw and loved, photographers I see composing and not complying to many of these rules yet still producing magical landscape photos. And this is why reflection, criticism and experience plays a big role here, it could be easy to continue living by these rules, and in my opinion, not knowing why or that there are other aspects.
But, in the pursuit of self improvement, you would eventually find the second camp, and your photographic world gets turned upside down, again! Photographers start pointing at images, saying you can see this area here is balanced by this subject here, or this line (that is absolutely not a line) leads the eye on a journey to here. I jest a little, but you know I am not far wrong!
At this point I’m going to introduce an analogy — not to sound obnoxious or artsy-fartsy, but because thinking about it this way genuinely helped me make sense of all of this. For whatever reason, music feels more tangible to me than photography. A piece of music is built from notes and chords; you need to understand them, but on their own they don’t create emotion. In the same way, compositional rules are the building blocks of a photograph — useful, even necessary — but they aren’t the thing that makes an image move you. What gives music its power is the intent behind it: how those notes are arranged, paced, emphasised, and allowed to breathe. That’s where perception and flow come in. And above even that sits the composer’s vision — the ability to start with a blank page and create something that can evoke tension, calm, joy, or unease. That, ultimately, is what I think we should be striving for in our photography: not simply placing elements correctly, but composing with intent, feeling, and purpose.
So, these two camps, really are cohesive concepts that should be used together with the larger vision to create a piece of photography that we strive to take. The larger vision, is what I experienced and described (perhaps without realising it) in my post “What is my subject?”, which perhaps needs further developing here.
Vision isn’t technique — it’s the artistic perception that drives the creative process. WHAT?! Okay, let me be more helpful. If you’ve read my post “What is my subject?”, you’ll remember that my best images came after doing something surprisingly simple: sitting down, sipping a drink, and just settling into the surroundings. I stopped hunting for shots and started paying attention. I began to feel the place, observe what was drawing me in, and shape frames around what I was experiencing rather than what I thought I should photograph. I understood the location, the mood, and what it meant to me in that moment — and that gave me vision.
So you can imagine my surprise when I later came across a video by Mark Denney where he describes exactly this approach: arrive, pause, sit, take note of how the place makes you feel. In all honesty, I was slightly shocked to discover I’d done something right — even if I’d arrived at it completely by chance. Mark goes on to describe these observations as your “puzzle pieces”: the elements that resonate with you, which you then arrange into a coherent image using your tools in composition.
This was a tough blog to write. It demanded learning, reflection, and a fair amount of honesty, and I can’t promise I’ll hold exactly the same views even this time next week. But that uncertainty feels like part of the process. Composition isn’t something we solve once; it’s something we return to, again and again, as our way of seeing evolves. If this post proves useful to me — now or in the future — and offers something helpful or reassuring to you wherever you are in your photographic journey, then I think it’s been worth writing.
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, here are a few resources that influenced my thinking:
Richard Garvey-Williams - Mastering Composition: The Definitive Guide for Photographers
Mads Peter Iversen - Landscape composition 1
Mark Denney - The Best COMPOSITION Advice I’ve EVER HEARD! Wish I Did This Sooner (Landscape Photography) YouTube
An example of natural framing composition technique
