Planning can greatly improve your chances of getting a 'keeper'. As I walk around I make it a practice to look at a potentially interesting scene and try to visualize how it would look under different lighting, time of year, weather conditions etc. I build up a mental inventory of possibilities for different scenarios eg diffused light, strong shadows, summer dawn, rainy winter, fall colors etc . When the conditions are right I will go and shoot with a much better chance of success.

For travelling, I plan my itinerary around the places I want to see. I use Google maps and Streetview to find the best vantage points and I use Photopills to plan the best time for the lighting I want. It doesn't always work out and many of my best shots have been unplanned grab shots, but there is great satisfaction in arriving at a location and watching it unfold exactly as you visualized months beforehand and from thousands of miles away.

Thank you to those that addressed the topic directly. For the many that wandered off into comments re the rules and application of the principles of composition, here’s another try at explaining my original thoughts. (Let me say emphatically, however, that the responses related to the hows and whys of composition have been very interesting and are very much appreciated!)

I admit to a personal bias: For me content (subject matter) is the most important aspect of a photograph, ahead of composition, color, sharpness and the other criteria we use to judge a image. I think of the content of a photograph the way I think of the content of a book – what is it about? Composition, stated simplistically, is the arrangement of the pieces that create the content.

So, the issue I raised is that I see lots of mention of “composition” but very little of “content” in UHH commentary on photographs. And that led me to wonder if some UHHers may be using the term composition when they really mean content or subject. (Linda asked for some examples but unfortunately I can’t point to any right now!)

Thank you all!

Sorry for helping lead the charge down the alternate path In UHH Photo Gallery I imagine that the majority of folks base their time spent viewing and the comments they leave on the photo's subject.

But I'm still unclear about how you're defining content. "What is it about?" is different in my mind than "here is the subject; the subject is [fill in the blank: flowers, bird, kid, tree, building]."

Sorry for helping lead the charge down the alternate path In UHH Photo Gallery I imagine that the majority of folks base their time spent viewing and the comments they leave on the photo's subject.

But I'm still unclear about how you're defining content. "What is it about?" is different in my mind than "here is the subject; the subject is [fill in the blank: flowers, bird, kid, tree, building]."