Composition is just the arrangement of things inside the frame, and a handful of old ideas genuinely help — as long as you hold them loosely. The rule of thirds, placing your subject off-centre rather than dead in the middle, tends to feel more natural and leaves room for a moment to breathe. Leading lines — a path, a banister, a row of chairs — quietly draw the eye toward what matters. Framing a subject through a doorway or branches adds depth and a sense of place.
But rules are scaffolding, not law. A subject centred perfectly can carry enormous stillness and symmetry; a tilted, cluttered, “wrong” frame can hold more feeling than a textbook-clean one. I’ve deleted plenty of technically correct photographs that said nothing, and kept blurry, lopsided ones that made me feel exactly what the moment felt like.
My honest advice: learn the rules well enough that they become instinct, then stop thinking about them. The goal was never a tidy composition. The goal is a photograph that means something — and meaning will occasionally ask you to break every rule you know.