7 guiding principles to improve your compositional skills and help you create better photographs

posted Thursday, August 15, 2019 at 12:00 PM EDT

One of the most exciting aspects of photography is that you can practice and put in the effort to improve your work and actually see the improvement taking place. If you go back and view your oldest images, you will often be able to see first-hand how far your skills have come. Further, no matter how talented a photographer is, there are always ways that they can improve. In the video below, photographer Nigel Danson shares seven tips to help fix your photos and improve your photography in general. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned shooter, there's likely a lesson to be learned in the video below, which you can put into practice to improve your own work.

Firstly, Danson thinks that there are four primary components which comprise a good photo: light, timing, an interesting subject and composition. Looking at composition in particular, Danson shares seven guiding principles he uses when evaluating his images to understand why a photo does or doesn't work. Importantly, these principles not only inform his image evaluation process, but they can also be considered when in the field to hopefully help capture stronger images to begin with.

His first tip is to consider the edges of your photo. This is something which is easy to do in the field, although even an advanced shooter has likely forgotten to check edges at one time or another. A distracting element along the edge of your frame can significantly hurt the overall image. To avoid this, simply consider your entire frame while shooting. Danson's second guiding principle is having a route through your image. By this he means giving the viewer a reasonable path through your image. When composing an image, consider how someone will see the shot and how their eyes will likely move through the frame. To see the other five guiding principles for improving your photographic compositions, watch Danson's full video below.