Advice or Simply General Guidelines on Composition,
Don't call them rules as you are allowed to breack them.

Have One Center of Interest
Before you press the shutter ask yourself "Why am I taking this picture? and "What do I want to show"? If you want to show three or four elements in your image, you should rethink. Getting closer to your subject will often overcome this problem.

Simple Background is Best
Having chosen a center of interest take care of the background. Move a few feet one way or the other, move up or down to eliminate those intrusive bits distracting from your subject. Backgrounds make or break your image. When out "street shooting", I will often find the background first and then wait for something to happen or someone to walk into the frame. In portraits, a background can make or break the entire photograph-either it helps to unobtrusively set off and tell something about the subject, or it is merely a distraction

Point of View
Don't be lazy. Move the camera away from the normal eye view. Hopp on a chair, dropp on your knees, get on the ground. This will give freshness and will show a simple subject from a different angle. It would be great to have a 5m ladder in our camera bag. High viewpoins give a overview of your location and great in isolate differnd elements in your image.

Isolate your Subject.

The Rule of Thirds
Move your subject out of the center of the frame. Also photography is call shooting don't have a bullseye vision. With the subject is stuck dead center you lose all dynamic in your image Very pleasing compositions occurred when the picture area is divided into 1/3 to 2/3 sections vertically and horizontally. The four points where those lines intersect are strongest areas to place your center of interest.
The rule of thirds works well for all images. Put someone in the center of the picture and you've got a snapshot; place your subject on one of the points where the line of third intersect, and it's an environmental portrait."

Placing of the Horizon
This is related to the rule of thirds but deserves its own mention because it is so important. It creates a , static and boring picture putting the horizon line through the center of a frame.
A horizon line placed in the upper third of the frame emphasizes the foreground . A horizon line in the lower third of the frame allows the sky to dominate to show interesting cloud formations colours etc.

Check the Edges of the Frame
Seeing is an interesting phenomina. What we see is very subjective. We see what we pay attention t, what grabs out interest and we ignore the rest. Your camera is objective; it records everything in the viewfinder. This is the reason why often resulting pictures not as good as we remember them looking through the viewfinder and releasing the shutter. Luckily we can train ourself to pay attention to all element in the picture, recognice compositional clutter and remove it physicaly if possible or shift position, get closer to remove it from the frame.

Lines of Direction
Leading the viewers eye into a picture, and not out of it means to engage the viewer in the picture. Use lines such as fences, roads, train tracks or even the horizons to point to you subject. Diagonal lines as well as "S" curved lines are often very successful in photographic composition.

Patterns
Having talked about a single centre of interest in an image a pattern seems quite the oposit. A pattern has many centers of interest. which are organized and therefore appear as one. This is not clutter, it is order with swing and rhythm.