Composition in photography is deep if not fairly abstract subject matter, and beyond the Rule of Thirds and Golden Spiral, things can get very subjective or in need of contextualization. This video offers quite a different way of approaching composition, using a technique developed by graphic designers.
In this video, Ted Forbes from The Art of Photography explains how while looking towards other art forms in order to improve his photography, he took a short course in graphic design in order to improve his composition skills. As some of you may already know — and some might be able to guess the relevance here — composition across all the visual art forms tends to follow the same or similar set of rules. That is one of the reasons why, no matter what kind of art you gravitate towards, it’s always a great idea to consume other kinds of art if you want to improve.
Inspiration can come from anywhere, though, not just visual art forms. I find much inspiration from books. Even though it’s not a visual medium — apart from the text of course — we still form the scenes in our mind’s eye. While you might not be consciously drawing inspiration for a photography project or image from a book that you’ve read, in my mind at least, I can’t help but think that these experiences of other mediums have some sort of effect on our ideas, unless you experience aphantasia — in which case, we would love to hear about how you conceptualize an idea for an image.