^{photo by Poike via iStock}

Photography composition is one of the harder aspects of photography for beginners. There seem to be a lot of arbitrary rules, and yet photography composition really comes down to building your creative eye. 

For this reason and many more, I get a lot of people asking me for photography composition tips. After all, it seems kind of unfair that so much of photography is about more technical techniques and photography composition just isn’t. 

Well, I recently stumbled across a beginner photography composition tutorial by Hyun Ralph Jeong that I found to be especially enlightening. If you want to watch it, I highly encourage you to. Otherwise, I’m going to walk you through some of the beginner photography tips he outlines in his video below.

Define Your Subject

^{photo by AzmanL via iStock}

One of the easiest ways to improve your photography composition is by defining your subject. If you, as the photographer, don’t know what your subject is, then it’s going to be a complete guessing game for your viewers. 

When you don’t define your subject, the viewer’s eye will dart all over your photograph looking for it. 

For instance, if you take a picture of multiple people scattered across a street, the viewer won't know where to look. If, however, you take a picture of just one of those people, or you clearly define one of these people as your subjects, the viewer will know exactly what they are supposed to be looking at and it will give them the freedom to explore the other parts of the photograph in due time. 

This technique is known as creating a visual hierarchy.

^{photo by xavierarnau via iStock}

You can create a visual hierarchy through the use of shadows or highlights, through distance, and through the use of foreground, middleground, and background. A little more obviously, you can also create a visual hierarchy by blurring the background and keeping the subject in sharp focus.  

More often than not, your subject should be the closest thing to the camera. It’s an easy way to distinguish between your subject and the background. However, once you master this type of photography composition, you will want to try something a bit more advanced, such as when your subject is framed by items that are closer to the camera. Jeong uses a tower in the distance and trees framing it as his example.

^{photo by Portra via iStock}

You can also use this technique by framing your subject with a window, a door frame, or an alleyway. 

One final way to define your subject is through the use of leading lines. A leading line will take the viewer’s eye from the beginning of the photograph, through the photograph, and to your subject. More often than not, your subject should be at the end of your leading line. 

The Rule of Thirds

If you haven’t heard of the rule of thirds, it is one of the most basic photography composition laws. For someone who is struggling with the creative side of photography, like photography composition, but who otherwise understands different technical aspects of photography, the rule of thirds could help you better understand how to create excellently composted photos. 

The rule of thirds states that every photograph can be broken down into nine different, evenly divided squares. Two of the lines run horizontally and two of them run vertically. 

To create good photography composition, you want to put your subject on any of the four crossing points of the lines (as the rock formation is in the image below). This ensures that your viewer knows that your subject is, in fact, your subject, without making your subject look boring by placing them in the dead center of your photo.

^{photo by fstopphotography via iStock}

With certain types of photos, like portraits, you might need to put your subject in the center of your photo. However, the rule of thirds is still important vertically. 

You can also center your subject as a composition choice. However, if you accidentally have your subject just a little bit off from dead center, it will be incredibly distracting. 

Of course, Jeong ends his video with the best photography composition advice of all: none of these rules are too rigid. If you want to break them in order to achieve a certain look with your photos, go for it. The problem is that you need to understand the generalized rules first in order to intentionally break them.