Mastering Essential Photo Composition Techniques

Taking appealing photos involves more than just pointing and shooting; it's about taking time and composing the image to guide the viewer's eye. There are countless techniques for photo composition techniques to explore. But I’ll keep it simple. In this blog post I’ll focus on the essential photo composition techniques – rule of thirds, leading lines, and framing – to elevate your photography and create visually stunning images.

Table of Contents

• The three layers in a photo
• The three essential photo composition techniques
  • Rule of thirds
  • Framing Technique
  • Leading Lines
• Summary: Three things to remember

The three layers in a photo

Typically, a photo contains three layers. These three layers are the foreground, the middle ground and the background. Of course, you have the creative freedom to omit any of these elements. But for this blog post, we’ll elaborate on a photo that has all three layers.

The background is usually the part of an image that’s furthest away from the viewer, like the sky or a skyline. The foreground is the opposite: it's the layer that is closest to the viewer. That can be a road, for example, a beach, the sea or a lake. Between the fore- and background is the middle ground, which often contains the main subject of the photo.

Take a look at the photo of the Statue of Liberty I took during a trip to New York. It’s a good example of a photo containing all three layers.

The sea is in the foreground. The skyline and the sky are the background, and in the middle ground is the main subject: the Statue of Liberty.

But as you notice, the Statue of Liberty is not placed at the center of the photo. This composition technique is called the rule of thirds. I’ll elaborate that in a minute.

So by using the rule of thirds and including a foreground as well as a background and a middle ground, the viewer may wonder where I took the photo from. Alternatively, the viewer may wonder if I just arrived (or depart) from New York on a ship. Well, at good observation, you’ll see that I’m definitely not departing from New York on a ship. In this case, I would have used the composition technique of leading lines by including the fairway of the ship as a leading line in the frame.

As you can see, how you compose a frame leaves a lot of room for interpretation by the viewer. So let’s take a brief look at the three most essential photo composition techniques. You’ll find a link to a more detailed explanation in each chapter.

The three essential photo composition techniques

According to my research, all three of these essential composition techniques existed way before photography was even invented. They were already used by painters. So you can consider them well explored and a good way to start.

Rule of thirds

To use the rule of thirds, almost all camera apps offer to enable a tic-tac-toe like grid in the viewfinder, essentially dividing the frame into 9 equally sized squares separated by 2 horizontal and 2 vertical lines.

Photographers typically place the subject of a photo at one of the intersections of the separating lines or along one of these lines.

What’s makes the rule of thirds so easy to use is that if you don’t get it right in the camera app, you can use any photo editing app to crop your photo accordingly. With the 48 megapixels of the iPhone 15, there are plenty of pixels for cropping. Secondly, the rule of thirds works for all kinds of image formats: the classic 4:3 format, the cinematic 16:9 format, portrait and landscape and even for the square image format.

But as with all rules in photography, the rule of thirds is mainly a rule of thumb. To learn more about the rule of thirds and different ways of using it, please head to my detailed blog post about what is the rule of thirds and how to use it in photography.

Framing Technique

The framing technique is the second essential photo composition technique. It’s commonly used to draw the attention of the viewer to a (smaller) main subject of the photo by framing it using e.g. natural or architectural frames in the foreground or even the middle ground (if the main subject is in the background).

But there’s more. You can also use the framing technique to convey all sorts of emotions like sadness or anger by contrasting the main subject, the frame and the background like in this photo.

To learn more and what you can use as a frame, please head to my blog post about what is framing in photography and how to use it.

Leading Lines

The last of the three essential photo composition techniques is the concept of leading lines. Similar to the framing technique, the leading lines composition technique is used to draw the attention of a viewer to the subject of a photo. By placing it along any natural or human-made line.

A photo can contain any number of leading lines having any form. They can be straight or curved, they can diverge or converge. The most important part in this composition technique is that the leading lines guide the eye of the viewer towards the main subject of the photo.

In this photo of an abandoned dentists chair, I used diverging leading lines that diverge from the background to highlight the main subject. And yes, the light that I used as leading lines actually form a frame around the subject.

So you can well combine any of the essential photo composition guidelines. For more examples about how to use lines, consider reading my blog post about how to use leading lines for your photos.

Summary: Three things to remember

First, there are three essential photo composition techniques that you should understand and try for your photos: the rule of thirds, the concepts of framing and leading lines.

Second, by intentionally applying one or more of the photo composition rules enables you to create more compelling photos.

Third, once you understand and mastered these compositional principles, try to use them in more creative ways. Understand the three rules and concepts mainly as a rule of thumb.