Composition: A simple, story-based approach to effective landscape photos.

Here’s a question for you: How do you tell captivating stories with your landscape photography that tell your viewers what you want them to know about a place? It seems to me that when you scroll through social media these days, the only acceptable way to create a landscape photograph is to get as close as possible to your foreground subject and have it dominate the entire frame. To be clear, I love a compositions like this, when it’s appropriate. However, shooting like this purely for visual impact is like landscape photography porn — it emphasizes aesthetics and visual impact over everything else, rather than being effective visual storytelling. In my opinion, the process should go the other way around. First, start with the story that you want to tell, and then let that dictate your composition.

If you want to be an effective storyteller as a photographer you need your compositions to match your impressions of the location. Your composition needs to show how you were feeling about the place and what was most important to your experience.

If you want to be your own artist, don’t be a slave to the popular aesthetic. First think consciously about the story that you want to tell and what you want your viewers to know about a place. Then use your composition to line up the elements in the scene in a way that tells that story. And if you do this, I guarantee that your photographs are going to be more successful and more personally expressive, which is what it takes to create art that you are proud of.

Check out the video above to see examples of storytelling and composition in action.