Intro to Strong Composition: A Free Course
I’m happy to announce I’ve released a free email course on composition called Intro to Strong Composition. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, which grew out of a composition book I’ve been working on for a few years now (and hope to release soon).
For me, composition is the most important part of photography by far, and determines how effective your images are in communicating something to the viewer. I think of composition as a distinct language, with its own syntax and grammar. The more fluent you become, the easier it is to communicate a visual story with others.
It’s the difference between fumbling your way through a simple statement in a foreign language and saying it with confidence in your native language. We’ve all been there, and when I give feedback to students on their images, this is exactly what I see.
Composition Compounds
Composition doesn’t end when you press the shutter. A clear compositional eye tells you if and where to crop, and which adjustments serve the image rather than just fiddling with it. So getting better at this doesn’t only change the photographs you are going to make, it improves the ones you have already made. Your whole archive gets better as you do.
I can’t think of another skill in photography that works backwards in time like that.
Of course, there’s much more to composition than I can cover in seven emails, but I believe this is a good introduction to strong composition that I think will benefit you regardless of your proficiency level.
Foundational principles never expire, and every time I revisit and write about them, I always learn something new that I couldn’t appreciate earlier because I couldn’t “see” it. Mastery is a process, and each step along the upward path reveals and explains at the same time.
The course is built the way I actually teach it. Each lesson gives you a cause, the symptoms it produces, and a test you can run on any image with your own eyes. It’s a way of looking you can practice.
If that sounds useful, you can start here: