This is very interesting as a piece of analysis, but I would caution folks against believing that this kind of complicated process is necessary to make striking photos.
Photography is an artistic endeavor, and art is strongest when it includes an intuitive aspect. That's how a photo becomes your photo, not just a nice-looking photo. And while reading art criticism can help develop intuition, it's even more important to just perceive a lot of art. Photo exhibitions, books, online galleries, etc that you view will all go into your brain and get mixed around. Then you start taking pictures and reviewing your own work, to see what worked and what didn't--for you, the artist.
To be a strong photographer, there's no substitute for just looking at a lot of photography and taking a lot of pictures. Articles like this can give you mental tools to reason about what you're feeling, but the essence of art is the feeling.
The one simple piece of advice for landscape photographers is that you're taking a picture of light. Most of the example photos in this article were taken in interesting light. A lot of them would be boring photos (despite strong composition theory) if taken at noon on a clear day.
Edit to add: I incline toward landscape photography myself, and two books that have really stuck with me are Examples by Ansel Adams and Mountain Light by Galen Rowell. Hearing (well, reading) from the artist about their decisions in making a striking image provides a more subjective perspective on photography--a good counterpoint to what I'd call a more observational or analytical approach like in the linked article.
Well put. Everything you said and a little bit of elaboration on art...
One of the best parts of photography is the speed at which you can have a conversation with your own visual system, refining it in the process.
Understanding art can be thought of as getting bored and finding something new, which is no longer boring, and repeat. Eventually you find yourself bored by almost everything, but with an intense passion for succinct relatable expression. This is often mistaken for pretension, and many do skip the process altogether; most unfortunately, even people calling themselves artists do so.
My point is all these composition rules are great; it’s invaluable stuff. But, you will get bored of them, and that is the beautiful part.
I wouldn't say "get bored of them", so much as sublimate them so you no longer think consciously about them. And you learn that it's not "following the rules of composition will make great photos", so much as "most great photos follow the rules of composition".
Composition is also about tension/resolution, much like music. You can increase tension, but that doesn't mean you're actually breaking rules.
Fair. I want to add that when I talk about “getting bored” of them, I personally do this in a childish and unrefined way on a regular basis. So I don’t want to sound like I necessarily mean progressing beyond them. A childish rebel instinct can result in boredom all the same. Paired with curiosity, it’s granted me with an accumulation of experiences in exploraing the visual world. The rules are wonderful but breaking them is what gives me resilience as an artist. It’s why I can fall from great heights, lose access to a medium, and overcome jealousy. I can always recall my own fluidly evolving set of rules. Don’t get me wrong; praise is really important, but the confidence in child’s play has over time fostered a relationship with my eyes that I only know to call love; certainly the closest thing to freedom I’ve ever known. I wish I were exaggerating because I sound like an absolute dork.
At the end of the day, I am actually a rigid rule follower in my output. Most of the rule-breaking takes place in my imagination. I find myself giggling to myself on film sets regularly, for example. Or at bus stops for that matter. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning.
Taking interesting photographs is much harder than taking well composed photographs. For that you need to refine your visual pallette and explore for good and interesting subjects, and find interesting ways to capture them. There are countless well composed shots of the Eiffel Tower, some are probably even accidental. So it does become hard to give much weight to composition, unless it is bad.
I always heard that as well. Cinematographers love this phrase, but I totally agree. That saying leaves the concept less than dependent on personal experience. I still don’t understand why, but the purest of expressions seem to come as side effects of the engagement process; not as rewards for accomplishments. So, one must engage and be honest as they can with the act itself, which isn’t to say one must suffer, but just aim to be in touch with their own experience with the medium. I will admit I personally suffer, but it’s not helpful.
I think there is a lot of benefit to knowing the fundamentals. Some people can develop their intuition just by looking at things but for me learning some theory is definitely useful. For example I had to take art classes in school. My stuff was horrible even after trying for years. Then my sister showed me drawing technique and some other trucks and suddenly I could draw decent stuff. It didn't make me into an artist but at least I had a foundation to build on. Same with photography. I think knowing things like the rule of thirds and some color theory can give you a big jump start.
I would add that this kind of literal analysis is only useful to train _seeing_. More so, you are training to see in a very specific way. The lines drawn in the picture by the author to indicate composition, rhythm and stability are quite arbitrary and could be drawn a dozens other ways.
In a way, you train your neural networks to see by looking at images, then, while actively photographing you outsource decision making to your own trained neural networks.
After a while you can predict the best camera position, settings and get a tingling sensation moments before an interesting situation (in street or event photography) happens.
The importance of good composition has diminished over the last century as technological advances have allowed for greater experimentation. When I took my first photography class in High School, our teacher gave us a single roll of film and dictated what he wanted to see in each shot taken (e.g. shallow depth of field) and any composites we did were by taking scissors to prints in the dark room. A lot of thought went into each shot when you knew you only had one shot.
Today we're able to take hundreds, even thousands, of ridiculously high resolution photographs of a scene. We can program our cameras to do automatic bracketing so we're sure to get the right exposure, and if not we can fix it in post. We're no longer limited to composition before we capture the photo as we can import a series of photos into Photoshop and create panoramic, HDR, composites, and just about anything else years after an event.
I think there is definitely some value in learning a few of these rules because they do help you take better pictures when you don't have the luxury of time to experiment, to plan or control your environment. A prime example is taking photos of your kid at a sporting event. Understanding lines of sight, directions of travel, the rule of thirds, and knowing how to frame the subject can really help you to capture the emotion felt in a very fleeting moment.
I've participated in online photo review communities that almost always seem to end up bickering about composition and other rules as if they were absolutes. Such discussions can often miss the underlying art, or photographer's message
These kinds of analysis are very useful. The field of aesthetics has very little science behind it. I agree that must professional photographers know about these but don't really use them formally. One use case that I think is not being mentioned is automated design tools, photography software plugins, AI, etc can utilize these. So anything that furthers these formal aesthetic systems is a win in my book.
Right — This is a good analysis of _why_ many photos look nice, but often in practice you're intuitively creating compositions like this. As you improve you can "feel" and see what makes a good composition without thinking about it in such a blatantly technical way.
There is some really great guidance here and some lovely images.
However, some caveats:
Almost all of the pictures used as examples are landscapes where people are not present or are mere compositional comments. In street or portrait photography, technical composition rules may be subordinate to the photographer's narrative. A better title for the article might be 'definitive guide for landscape photographers'.
All of the pictures use ambient light (admittedly some of the light is stunning, but it is all supplied by nature). Adding controlled light (e.g. flash but also studio lighting) can give a lot of additional compositional control. See [0] for examples.
There is no mention of considering how the picture will be used when considering composition. In commercial photography, the composition may have to fit a specific page aspect ratio, and include empty spaces where text or other elements can be added. Not taking this into account can limit the commercial use of the picture.
[Edit] Another way to get interesting compositions is to use different compositions than the other photographers. Simply crouching down to ground level is a good way to do this. Putting on a much wider angle lens can also help.
Yes, the light in the shown pictures is natural, however the article fails to mention that all of them have a fair amount of post-processing (apart from cropping). A reader inexperienced in the matter is led to believe that if only the composition is right the images will come out of the camera as striking as shown, which isn't true. Good processing is one of the keys to creating pictures with impact. Especially when shooting digital the images out of the box tend to be flat and naturalistic as opposed to stylized or artistic.
If I would teach people one thing about photography. Is learning previsualization.
This is a very interesting and exhaustive guide. It's great for analyzing photos that work and explaining why they do work.
I think photography (for beginners) should be about personal fulfillment, capturing memories and telling stories.
Along with that (as others have pointed out) just learn about the rule of thirds.
You can practice previsualization all the time and like anything else, it's something you get better the more you do it. For example, my default street photography lens is 28mm. I think shooting with long lenses is not intimate. After many years, my eyes see in 28 and I know more or less what the frame will be once I look through the camera. I've usually taken the photo in my head before I even lift the camera. Sometimes the result is better than what I imagine, sometimes is worse.
There's one other thing that very few people learn or intuitively understand: there's an enormous amount of light and visuals that we process due to our peripheral vision. While we may think the scene is 3:2 that we frame with a camera, in reality our brain captures 120-180 degrees of information outside the 3:2 frame which adjusts our perception of what would be in a photo vs. what would actually end up in a photo.
Same goes with the light: if you want to know how the camera sees the scene, squint -- it would compensate for extra peripheral light.
I would actually place one rule before those, and it's a purely technical one:
Understand and embrace exposure compensation. If your camera doesn't give you rapid access to that control, get a new one. (Thankfully most cell phone cameras do these days.)
90% of crappy Facebook pictures could be made passable if the subjects were correctly exposed. Too often, bright or dark backgrounds are exposed as a dull grey, leaving subjects washed out or in shadow.
If the scene is bright ("high key"), nudge that knob up so it looks bright. If the scene is dark ("low key"), nudge it down so it looks dark. This can completely change the dynamics of a photograph for the better, and will allow you to more readily focus on the aesthetic aspects of photography such as composition.
I used to embrace exposure compensation a lot more on older DSLRs, but the exposure latitude of modern camera RAW output is now so great you can easily fix an image exposure +/- one stop with little or no real perceivable loss of quality. Shoot RAW, worry about exposure nudges later. I'd say this is true pretty much of anything with a micro 4/3s or larger sensor since about 2013.
Even supposedly unrecoverable washed out highlights are surprisingly recoverable on newer cameras. For sure there are exceptions (bright snow scenes for example), but it's rare I will touch the exposure comp dial today.
Yes, if you're shooting RAW, you're past the point where the above advice is applicable. But there's a lot of people who don't (beginners, casual photographers who want something that looks better than Facebook selfies).
Perhaps, but to use the exposure comp dial effectively you need to know what an exposure "stop" is, which is a pretty complex concept if you are just a casual snapper, especially as it is inter-related to ISO/aperture/shutterspeed with changes in any one affecting the other two. This is probably why very few compact cameras even have a dedicated exposure comp dial, and virtually no OEM/standard cellphone camera apps expose this setting. If we are talking casual snappers nowadays we more often than not are referring to cellphone photographers, as the continuing collapse of the compact camera market illustrates.
Exposure metering is pretty great nowadays anyway (even on modern cellphones like the Pixel/iPhone), I love how you can effectively spot meter on the iPhone just by touching anywhere on the viewfinder.
Why would you need to know anything about stops? Just turn the dial up or down until the preview matches your experience. My phone's exposure dial doesn't even have markings.
I agree that tap-for-spot-expose is nice, but insufficient if your subject should be bright or dark. E.g. taking a picture of a high- or low-key mural.
But I'm not giving advice to "great photographers", I'm giving advice to beginners.
It's kind of like saying, "a virtuoso can make beautiful music with an out-of-tune guitar". That's very true, but beginners should still tune their guitars.
Feelings don't matter if you can't see the subject because your point and shoot exposed for the bright background. That's frustrating and gets in the way of producing a shot you're proud of (e.g. by using the framing techniques you suggest).
I disagree. While white balance, focus, and even flash control have improved to the point that beginners can safely ignore them to focus on composition, in my experience exposure compensation has lagged behind.
Take SnapChat for example. It's a great gateway into photography, because it's fun and accessible. But god forbid you ever pose a subject against a white background. You're just looking at a grey mess with a dark blob in front of it.
At least the camera app on my Motorola sprouted a compensation dial a couple years back. That made me very happy, and comfortable enough just to carry my phone around for casual photography.
To mirror your reply, a perfectly composed picture where the subject is just a black blob against a generic blue sky exposed to middle grey is still a bad picture. I'm not disagreeing with your advice; but I don't think it's either-or.
Modern sensors gave the software enormous ability to extract details and do exposure compensation on shadows and only shadows in post processing, especially if the scene is stored in RAW format. There's however nothing that the sensors can do with the washed out highlights - that information is gone and no post processing can do anything about it. So the basic rule of shooting a scene that has brights and dark elements is to always underexpose to get the bright details in as it keep the option of bringing dark details out.
My advice isn't targeted at photographers who know how to develop raws. I would expect they already know what exposure is, and if they don't, well, my advice applies equally well to development as shooting.
Someone just getting started in the hobby is much better served by learning to turn a dial on their point-and-shoot than messing around with developing raws. Minimizing the turnaround time between shooting and results is crucial to promote development of aesthetic sense and appreciation for the hobby that is necessary to justify the investment in learning the development process.
* look at (and fill) the edges of the frame. Too often, we look at the part of the picture we are interested in (often the center), and ignore the empty/ugly space around it. Look at the edges, and the center will take care of itself.
"Wow, that's a really good photo! You must have a great camera!"
This article hits on a key thing - the main things controlling the quality/interest of a photo are composition, subject, and exposure. The main dimension "really good camera!" helps in these days is resolution, which has approximately zero to do with photo quality.
edit: I have a print of a favorite photo of mine above my fireplace mantle. It was shot with an old Motorola RAZR, at 320x240px. It's pixellated like crazy in print. It's also full of high-contrast problems - a large blown-out splotch off center from directly facing a light, and the mere shadow outlines of numerous hands in he air in the foreground (it was shot at a Flaming Lips concert). It's epic and beautiful. Why? Good composition, and interesting subject matter (hands in the air, facing a shadowy barely-recognizable human outline).
A modern high res camera does allow for more mistakes though. A good photographer doesn't under- or overexpose 2 stops. I do. A good photographer doesn't so often realize that the good bit of the image is actually 1/5th of it, in the corner. I do.
So I crop 1/5 of the image and boost the exposure 2stops. If I do that with a camera just a few years old, the result is terrible.
Now obviously, if the image is bad or completely uninteresting to begin with then no technological thing is going to help. But it's nice crutches for beginners. After I cropped my image to 1/5, I learned what I should have done. In the past, that was a really expensive lesson (the photo was ruined). Now I get the lesson AND the photo.
I underexpose two stops on occasion if the highlights are too blown out and I want that detail - it's really easy to bring the shadows back up in lightroom.
When I showed it to family members, most of them liked it. Then one of them asked "What camera did you use to take this picture?"
I said "Just an old 6x6 Japanese box, loaded with Portra 400"
Maybe someday I'll visit that place again, shoot a 4x5 and make really huge print of it :D
To the extent that "exposure" means "don't screw it up, probably", modern cameras are really helpful. To the extent that exposure means "Conscious control of motion blur, depth of field, etc", I find myself reverting back to manual, aperture priority, and shutter priority modes that have been around since the 1970s.
Thinking about it, this also shows up in the divide between my two main cameras - a Nikon DSLR, which offers me total control and an experience very similar to the film environment I learned in, and an iPhone, which offers me almost no control at all. I use and love both.
I wish I could have a nice DSLR (but those things costs a pile of money!), unfortunately I wonder if I could be arsed to lug it around that often... Therefore I have an iPhone that is always on me and use the default app for quick snaps[0], but lately if I want to take a nice shot I'll use a more advanced app offering more manual control (as well as increased feedback (namely ProCamera). Just being able to have some fine, locked control on focus and tweak exposure compensation with a live mini histogram makes a world of difference†, even before you prioritise shutter vs ISO.
† Tip: (thank you non-discoverable UI) The default iPhone app can lock AE/AF by loooooong-touching until it locks, and you can adjust exposure compensation by sliding up and down, but the former is a AF lock (not a manual set) and the second one is both highly imprecise and takes ages to go through large ranges when AE screws up. ProCamera's UI is both much more intuitive, responsive, and full-featured.
When people say that, I point them to my Instagram[0] and ask them to see if they can spot the few photos I took with my mobile phone. Invariably, they can't, because I don't think it's even possible for Instagram photos (unless you know to disregard narrow shots, which is something phones can't do well).
My 300 EUR camera can focus on the eye, and my 1.8f lens will make the background blurry. All I add is rule of the third. The camera will also measure the exposure according to the face.
And suddenly I made a photo that other people find aesthetically pleasing.
It's going to be interesting ones artificial blur / bokeh and AI compositions are mainstream.
If you enjoyed this then I highly recommend reading "Learning to see creatively" by Bryan Peterson.
The book basically consists of him walking you through how he made some of his great photographs. What the location looked like, which angles he considered and why some worked better (compositionally) than others. It was really eye opening and completely changed the way I walk around and take photos! (from random snapshots to well considered compositions)
I love photography, but I just don't think I'll ever be good at it.
I think I just don't have an 'eye' for what makes a good photograph.
I have taken some photographs I love, but they aren't technically good and are only good to me (because of the memories with the photo or who is in the photo).
It's annoying as I love it, and I love going out and practicing more. I've read lots on composition etc and how to use my camera but I find it so hard to actually picture the scene in my head and what will make a good photo.
Also, what are peoples throw away rates like? If I go out for a day with the camera and take say 20 photos. I might save 1.
> I have taken some photographs I love, but they aren't technically good and are only good to me (because of the memories with the photo or who is in the photo).
This is a dilemma of lots of people who shoot professionally - they have photos that they want to keep because of the subjects/moments/memories which are objectively not as good as the photos that could take with the same subjects/moments/memories if they had approached them more as the professional shoots -- they did not.
The solution to that is simple - two different collections. One for the 'Personal photos' and one for 'Excellent Photos'.
> It's annoying as I love it, and I love going out and practicing more. I've read lots on composition etc and how to use my camera but I find it so hard to actually picture the scene in my head and what will make a good photo
Never take one photo. In fact, never take two or three photos. Take dozens photos even if you are just tapping a button on your phone camera app. Move phone left. Move it right. Change angle. Move closer. Move out. But keep pushing the button. After that pull the photos for the same scene into a strip and do an edit. First cull obviously bad photos - out of focus, washed out background if you did not want it, weird dude sucking on his thumb in a corner etc -- you took a dozen photos of nearly the same scene so it is not like you don't have a room to cut. After that do a tennis tournament. Compare two photos side by side. Pick a dinner. Delete the loser. Walk this down to 1 photo for that scene and be amazed at how much better that photos is than the one you thought you were going to get.
> Also, what are peoples throw away rates like? If I go out for a day with the camera and take say 20 photos. I might save 1.
If you have people in the photos, then keeping one in twenty for a day of shooting is a very high and unnecessary precious keep rate ( please don't take it the wrong way ).
> After that do a tennis tournament. Compare two photos side by side. Pick a dinner. Delete the loser. Walk this down to 1 photo for that scene and be amazed at how much better that photos is than the one you thought you were going to get.
It's also great for static things with too little light and no tripod. With enough attempts, at least one of them will be a lot less blurry than the average.
In good light with static objects, I'll take a handful of shots even of the same framing. Even though one "would be enough", and nobody would notice anything wrong with it, if you take a bunch and compare them you can get rewarded greatly. The focus will never sit in the exact spot.
If you're keeping one photo in 20, you're on the right path. :) Mine is 3-5% keep rate, for studio work. I'm not hard enough on myself. The most valuable thing I've ever done as a photographer is learning to throw as much as possible away. When you're throwing out bad photos, it's good. When you throw out good photos, it's better. When you can throw out great photos, you're getting somewhere!
My suggestion is to study the works of great photographers . A lot.
BW: Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Brett Weston, John Sexton,...
Color: Ernst Haas, Harry Gruyaert, Saul Leiter, William Eggleston,...
Also study non-photographic books as well. I'm mostly interested in shapes and patterns, that's why I read architecture books as well.
BTW, for this learning purpose, I made a decision to only shoot film (mostly 35mm, sometimes medium format). I usually have the Nikon F2 and Minolta spotmeter ready in my bag. Whenever I feel bored at work, I grab my camera and wander around, looking for anything interesting.
By interesting, I mean anything. It doesn't have to be socially profound. It doesn't have to be 'decisive' ala Henri Carier-Bresson. It doesn't have to be dramatic like golden hour scene. Sometimes certain patterns in the window or a small crack in the well can be interesting too. You just need to see them carefully.
If I'm shooting 35mm, 10 out of 36 frames is good enough. Or if I'm shooting medium format, perhaps 5 or 6 out of 12.
Never immediately throw your bad photos. See if you can notice any mistakes/improvement possibilities.
On a roll of 12 medium format shots, I usually get 3-4 tops that I'm happy with to print. On a 35mm roll of 36 shots, it was usually around 8 or 10. So from a quarter to a third. It's been years since I intensely shot digital, but I was probably closer to to 1~5% then. Film is nice in that it forces you to really stop and think about your shot.
I'd recommend consuming A LOT of photography if you want to get better. Pick a subject matter you want to get good at (landscape? fashion? black and white portraits? etc.) and immerse yourself in the works of the greats of that field. Go to photo galleries, museums, etc., when looking at the picture try to imagine how the image was framed, what choices the photographers made; and then try to emulate a bit of what you see in your own photography.
I've almost completely given up on 35mm, going with the Hasselblad or the Fuji 690 most of the time. Or my 4x5, in which case I'm feeling lucky if I get 3 or 4 shots done in a day. I do have a digital camera, and even with that, I still can't get past the habit of only shooting when I like what I see. I don't understand at all the urge to take huge numbers of shots and sort them out later, when I can do it in my head before I press the shutter.
I still shoot a tiny bit of 35mm - mostly with a Rollei 35S, which is a wonderfully compact camera that fits in any pocket, and makes taking casual snaps when going out with friends etc. a breeze when lugging a medium format would be a pain. I am also very tempted by the Hasselblad Xpan - there's something wonderful about panoramic shots. I could get a panoramic medium format, but they're usually quite tedious to carry.
> I don't understand at all the urge to take huge numbers of shots and sort them out later, when I can do it in my head before I press the shutter.
If you're commercially shooting a sporting event/wedding/etc., I can definitely see the value in that approach. Unless the client specifically requested a film shoot, and understood the tradeoffs that come with it, I wouldn't be comfortable shooting those kind of events in medium format.
Nice on you for going 4x5. The results are heavenly - I haven't dipped a toe in it yet because you start being very constrained by the weight + size + setup time of your gear...
Most photographers zoom out a little so they have room to crop. This is especially handy in landscape photography, because of the need for full front to back sharpness. Unless you have a fantastic lens/camera system, you cannot go down to f/22 and expect a sharp photo. But if you widen the aperture your depth of field is limited. So landscape photographers often zoom out and shoot at f/14 or wider, and then crop to what they initially wanted to catch.
So yes, fill the frame, but only after cropping.
Finally, I tend to agree with one book I read. When it comes to landscape photography, just remember two rules:
1. Convey depth (landscape photos are best when you have interesting elements both near and far).
2. Utilize balance
All the other rules you tend to see tend to either support one of these two. If they don't, ignore them. There are several composition tricks to convey depth. But if you just learn the rules individually, you'll end up with compositions where you have multiple elements conveying depth (one is enough!)
If you zoom out and crop, you still lose the same angular resolution to diffraction as if you had just stopped down at the longer focal length. Object space lens resolution is diffraction limited by the size of the entrance pupil, in exact inverse proportion to the depth of field.
Plus when you zoom out and crop you waste sensor resolution and photon gathering power...
Plus, even an expensive camera suffers at f/22. The only thing you can do is use tilt shift and an actual larger aperture.
>If you zoom out and crop, you still lose the same angular resolution to diffraction as if you had just stopped down at the longer focal length. Object space lens resolution is diffraction limited by the size of the entrance pupil, in exact inverse proportion to the depth of field.
Interesting - any real world tests to demonstrate this? When it comes to DOF, I'm not interested in logic or theory. I've seen too many flamewars that involve only theory and no actual field tests.
>Plus when you zoom out and crop you waste sensor resolution and photon gathering power...
I started digital photography on 2 MP. Then moved up to 8 MP. Then to 16 MP. From my experience, the difference between 8 and 16 MP is fairly small. The only benefit for me to go to higher resolution at this stage is the ability to crop and still get high resolution. Without cropping, I don't benefit from extra megapixels.
I just tested 100mm at f/32 against 50mm at f/16, which have the same entrance pupil size, and when cropped to the same part of the subject, the longer focal length simply wipes the floor with the shorter focal length.
1. The goal is to maintain the DOF distance. For 100mm at f/32, if you go to 50mm, you need f/8.
2. The assumption is that the lens is as sharp at 100mm as it is at 50mm (on some lenses this is a terrible assumption).
I tried a similar experiment comparing 25mm with 50mm (f/5.6 vs f/22). You can see the results at https://imgur.com/a/ik6qe5K
To me, they are almost identical - with 25mm seeming a tad bit sharper. In a way, though, you're right - the difference is so small that I might as well shoot at f/22.
The goal is to maintain DOF and field of view; if you crop to the same field of view, and the entrance pupils are the same size, then you have the same DOF.
100mm at f/32 is the same as 50mm at f/8 only if you don't crop 50mm by 2x.
These are both excellent lenses, and at f/32 and f/16, optical quality basically ceases to matter.
For a slightly different approach to this topic, I recommend reading two books by Michael Freeman: The Photographer's Eye [1] and The Photographer's Mind [2]
Instead of prescribing a particular process of composition, the books focus on clearly outlining the variables you control while taking a photograph. Once you've internalised the boundaries of the space you're working in, it's up to you to decide how to navigate through it.
Put another way, there may be definite rules for what makes something look pleasing, but a good photograph is not necessarily the most visually pleasing image. A great photographer has developed the intuition to know how to mix pleasing and disturbing elements to create a profound effect.
I often see the rule of thirds suggested as a compositional tool. Yet I have never encountered any convincing justification for it. Ditto for the golden section. Anyone have strong opinions on this?
The golden section is complete woo and in scientific studies, people tend not to prefer compositions made with the golden section. As for the rule of thirds, think of it as a way of thinking about your photo rather than an actual rule. There's no reason why you can't think of the composition in your photo in quarters, or any other arbitrary subdivision. 3x3 is just a small enough number that you can approximately think about a picture that way.
Photography is an artistic endeavor, and art is strongest when it includes an intuitive aspect. That's how a photo becomes your photo, not just a nice-looking photo. And while reading art criticism can help develop intuition, it's even more important to just perceive a lot of art. Photo exhibitions, books, online galleries, etc that you view will all go into your brain and get mixed around. Then you start taking pictures and reviewing your own work, to see what worked and what didn't--for you, the artist.
To be a strong photographer, there's no substitute for just looking at a lot of photography and taking a lot of pictures. Articles like this can give you mental tools to reason about what you're feeling, but the essence of art is the feeling.
The one simple piece of advice for landscape photographers is that you're taking a picture of light. Most of the example photos in this article were taken in interesting light. A lot of them would be boring photos (despite strong composition theory) if taken at noon on a clear day.
Edit to add: I incline toward landscape photography myself, and two books that have really stuck with me are Examples by Ansel Adams and Mountain Light by Galen Rowell. Hearing (well, reading) from the artist about their decisions in making a striking image provides a more subjective perspective on photography--a good counterpoint to what I'd call a more observational or analytical approach like in the linked article.