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Composition is KEY

Bogframe said:
My grandfather, artist A.J. Bogdanove Z"L had one hard and fast composition rule that he taught to my father, who taught it to me:
"The Horizon is ALWAYS horizontal."
With this rule in my head, I go crazy every time I see what could be a great landscape ruined by the camera being at a tilt.
With that in mind, this is one of my favorite compositions from my trip to Monhegan Island in Maine a few weeks ago.

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That is one thing I struggle with constantly, even though my camera has a built-in horizon feature in the view finder. I think my problem is my nose keeps causing me to tilt the camera.
 
Complete subservience to the lower thirds line. But the almost orthogonal plane of the leaves to the camera makes this one pop for me and came out as I'd envisioned there in the moment.

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Old Ears too said:
That is one thing I struggle with constantly, even though my camera has a built-in horizon feature in the view finder. I think my problem is my nose keeps causing me to tilt the camera.
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I have a lot of trouble keeping things level also. The "straighten" slider in my editor gets a good bit of use, for sure.
 
One of the biggest crimes I see committed, and used to fall prey to a lot in composition is being too close to your subject. Especially in landscape photography. We tend to see an interesting thing and see a good photo, but instead of showing the context of the object and its place in the world we end up showing only the object itself which leads to a more boring photo overall.

This, for example, works for me because of the comedic juxtaposition, the subject is the sign but the setting makes the commentary. The sign by itself would not be funny or interesting
NX6DKoyh.jpg


You can also make up for set and setting in how you display your photographs. These apart don't do much for me, but together I quite enjoy looking at the crime and the criminal.
ImH3gRe.jpg


Ted Forbes has a wonderful series on composition, and while I don't believe it necessary to apply traditional composition techniques to achieve a good photo it is important to understand them so you know what to break when to achieve your goal.

 
What has stuck with me is, you are not photographing an object. You are photographing how light interacts with an object.
 
I see a lot of wildlife images here, and most everywhere else where the subject fills (or is cropped to) 80+% of the frame. Living things need room to live within, and I try to be aware of that when framing.
 
Since this is a composition thread and not just a "post your images" one (already have one of those, It'd be good to include your notes on the compositional decisions that you made prior to imaging.


Compositional decisions: strong lines from the underbelly are of this brige, and to have the sun diffract around an edge in order to assist in the lens in creating a sunstar near a thirds line.
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Compositional decisions: Thirds line, and skimmed lighting. I came across this when it was in shadow and I looked at how the sun would be changing its position. I moved along for other subjects in the meantime, expecting for it to be about an hour for the lighting I wanted. When I returned to it, there it was!

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