Simple General Guidelines on Composition

Have One Centre 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 centre 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" it's often better to 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 standing height eye view. Instead, hop up on a chair, drop onto your knees, or get down low on the ground. These positions will give freshness and present a simple subject from a different angle. (It would be great to have a five metre ladder in our camera bag.) High viewpoints provide an overview of your location and can be great for isolating different elements in your image.
Also, photos taken from high viewpoints can be used to create Miniature Faking, also known as Diorama Effect or Diorama Illusion. For more on this see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_faking
 

Isolate your Subject:
 

The Rule of Thirds
 
Move your subject out of the centre of the frame. Also, photography is not called shooting, so don't have a bull's eye vision. When the subject is shot dead centre you lose all dynamics in your image.  Very pleasing compositions occur when the picture area is divided into 1/3 to 2/3 sections, both vertically and horizontally. The four points where those lines intersect {see image above} are, more often than not, the strongest areas to place your centre of interest. The rule of thirds works well for all images. Put someone in the centre of the picture and you've got a snapshot; place your subject on one of the points where the lines of thirds 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.  When you place the horizon line through the centre of the frame it creates a static and results in a boring picture.  In a landscape image a horizon line placed in the upper third of the frame emphasises the foreground; whilst a horizon line in the lower third of the frame allows the sky to dominate, which is great for highlighting interesting cloud formations and colours, etc. 
Another thing to watch is to make sure the horizon appears horizontal; for example, the ocean's horizon does not lie on a slope, so concentrate on holding your camera horizontal, or parallel, with the horizon.  Another way to do this is to use a tripod with a built-in bubble level, or you can use a level attached to the camera's hot shoe.
 
Check the Edges of the Frame
 
Seeing is an interesting phenomenon. What we see is very subjective. We see what we pay attention to, what grabs our interest, and we ignore the rest. Your camera is objective; it records everything in the viewfinder. Often this is the reason why resulting pictures are not as good as we remember them when looking through the viewfinder and releasing the shutter. Luckily we can train ourselves to pay attention to all the elements in the picture, recognise compositional clutter and remove it physically if possible, or shift our position, or get closer to the subject, to remove the distracting clutter from the frame.
 
Lines of Direction
 
Leading the viewer's eye into a picture, 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 your 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 opposite. A pattern has many centres of interest, which are organised and therefore appear as one.  This is not clutter, it's order with swing and rhythm.
 
Composition is a big subject and this page only provides the basic rules of composition. And rules can be broken, but it has to work to be successful. If you join Manawatu Camera Club, over time you will learn more about composition and be able to apply what you learn to improve your photos quite dramatically.