People always want to be told how to compose pictures, so I should say a decent minimum about “composition”. The word means “what things are made of”.
The idea of composition as the good or bad arrangement of things with the boundaries of pictures has some descriptive truth: some arrangements do work better than others. But the idea has been blown up out of all proportion and used prescriptively, as if following “rules of thirds” or using “leading lines” would automatically solve the unpredictable problems of pictures not yet made. It doesn’t work. The whole idea is pernicious nonsense; and composition, used in that sense, is a dirty word.
The way to arrange pictures well is to pay attention to what you see when photographing and printing and to fill the pictures with things that are worth seeing. No rules apply. You will do best by ignoring all rules and making your own decision according to what you see and feel.
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