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In fact the very word ‘composition’ is contaminated by this obsession with rules. This is why we’re avoiding it as far as possible. The alternative term, ‘framing’, says exactly what we’re doing and doesn’t carry anywhere near as much baggage.

We’ve already dropped a few hints about framing in ssss1. The central skill is seeing the whole picture. And it is a skill that anyone can develop, not some mysterious gift given only to a few.

The image on screen or finder is different from the real world because it has two dimensions instead of three. It’s also different because it’s a rectangle. Long before photography, the vast majority of paintings and drawings were produced on rectangular paper or canvas and often placed in rectangular frames. Today we view many images on screens; whether computer, iPad or iPhone, they’re all rectangles. We can trim images to different shapes and present them in other forms, but in practice we rarely do so and it’s usually an afterthought. Film or digital, every image starts out as a rectangle. (OK, not every photograph: some fish-eye lenses generate a circular image.)