Composition

Today I am going to try and cover composition. The first thing to say is that every person is entitled to see things their own way and that all rules (in life and composition) should be treated with an element of suspicion. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so they say. As an example I am using a simple Austrian landscape. First as shot:-

As you can see - a typical mountain scene with a road leading to a house. It's no prize winner but I think it's OK. With the aid of hindsite I might have cropped it so that the farm house obeyed the Golden Mean or Section rule I suggest that a Google search on this subject would be better than me explaining the concept. But with an image editor (Elements or Photoshop) such a thing is possible.

This is going some way towards my aim - which is to have the road lead the eye to the farm house - but it needed to have slightly more foreground (I cut a chunk off and placed it at the bottom to give more depth). Doing this moved the farmhouse further up the picture so that it was close to the intersection of the image divided into thirds which approximately corresponds to the Golden Mean (Section or Ratio)

This is the way composition works - the eye needs to be drawn to the subject or object of interest. Any way of doing this has the same effect but the Golden Ratio system is meant to be aesthetically pleasing. If you are taking a picture for advertising purposes then anything that draws the viewers eye to where it matters is mostly what it's about. You could use lighting to the same effect.