I’ve been teaching photography long enough to know that most beginners think composition is about rules. The rule of thirds. Leading lines. The golden ratio. They memorize the list, they tick the boxes, and then they wonder why their photos still feel flat.

That’s the problem I kept running into with students who came to my Sunday morning photo walks. They’d do everything “right” and still produce images that didn’t have any pull to them. I’d been searching for a cleaner way to explain what was actually missing, and then I came across this short from Joel Grimes.

In this Joel Grimes tutorial, he works through a composition exercise using a simple subject and a deliberate, repeatable process. It’s short, but there’s a lot packed into it, and the framework he uses is one I’ve started stealing shamelessly for my own teaching.

Composition Isn’t About Rules, It’s About Intention

The first thing Grimes makes clear is that composition is a decision-making process, not a checklist. Before you raise the camera, you should already have a sense of what you want the viewer’s eye to do. Where do you want it to enter the frame? Where do you want it to rest?

This sounds obvious, but most of us, myself included, still fall into the habit of pointing at something interesting and pressing the shutter. The “interesting thing” becomes the whole plan. Grimes pushes back on that by asking a more specific question: what is the relationship between your subject and everything else in the frame?

That reframe alone is worth bookmarking.

The Project Structure: Working the Frame Deliberately

What makes the tutorial useful for practical application is that Grimes treats the composition process like a project, not a single shot. He encourages you to work through multiple framings of the same subject before deciding you’ve got it.

Here’s how to apply that in your own shooting:

  1. Start wide. Get the full environment in the frame so you understand what you’re working with.
  2. Identify your primary subject. Not just what’s interesting, but what carries the story.
  3. Find the tension. What else in the frame is competing for attention? Is that competition helping or hurting?
  4. Move. Physically change your position before you change your settings. A shift of two feet can completely alter the relationship between foreground and background.
  5. Make a final intentional choice. Not “this looks good,” but “I want the eye to travel here, then here.”

This five-step approach works whether you’re shooting with a mirrorless setup or, yes, a phone. Some of my most-discussed teaching photos were shot on a $200 Android because I was working the frame deliberately, not relying on gear to do the thinking.

What “Earning” a Composition Actually Means

One phrase from the tutorial stuck with me: the idea that you earn a strong composition by doing the work before you shoot. Grimes isn’t talking about spending hours on location, he’s talking about spending the first few minutes of any shoot in observation mode rather than capture mode.

In practice, this means walking the scene, looking at how the light falls, noticing what draws your eye naturally, and then asking why. The elements that catch your eye are almost always the same elements your viewer’s eye will follow. Use that information. If a diagonal line in the background keeps pulling your attention, either align your subject along it or eliminate it from the frame entirely. Leaving it in without intention is the thing that makes photos feel busy or unresolved.

Grimes’ approach essentially asks you to become conscious of the process that good photographers are doing subconsciously after years of practice. For anyone earlier in their photography journey, making it explicit and step-by-step is genuinely useful.

Where I’d Push Back (Just a Little)

I want to be honest about one limitation I’ve noticed with this framework, because I think it makes the advice more trustworthy, not less.

The deliberate, project-based approach Grimes describes works beautifully for controlled or semi-controlled environments, editorial setups, portraits, architecture, still life. It’s harder to apply directly in fast-moving situations. Street photography, travel moments, kids at play. When I was in Japan last spring trying to photograph the Fushimi Inari shrine gates during peak foot traffic, a five-step deliberate process would have meant missing every good shot.

For those situations, I’d suggest doing the Grimes framework before the action starts. Spend the first ten minutes working the frame when the scene is quiet, internalize the relationships you want to capture, and then let that inform your instincts when things speed up. You’re not abandoning intentionality, you’re front-loading it.

The One Thing to Carry Out of This Tutorial

If you only take one thing from Grimes’ tutorial, make it this: raise the camera after you’ve made a decision, not before.

That single shift, from reactive framing to intentional framing, is where most of the visible improvement in composition actually lives. Watch the full video to see how Grimes demonstrates this visually with a real subject, because seeing him physically move through the process makes the concept click in a way that written instructions can only partially capture.