Forget composition rules. Trust your feelings more.

Hi Nando, I have always been annoyed by those photographic composition rules. I have always been trained in feeling and image from a painting and decoration perspective. From the moment I started taking an interest in photography and reading about it, I was amazed by the composition rules . It may possibly help at the start, but I think it is something you should replace as quickly as possible with: "What appeals to me and what doesn't" Adding "Feeling" is nice, however it is not easy to put that into practice. Even now you are influenced again when editing photos. It is full of too many edited basic photos and contrived ones that also turn out to be prize-winning.
So on to : What do I find beautiful, exciting, and right : "My image, speaking and exactly as I want it " and forget everything that according to the " Experts" should be done .

Dick Eduard

You can indeed (just) rely on feeling when determining the composition of your photo, but ultimately, when you later look at and analyze the photo, you will find that a certain compositional rule was in fact respected. The reverse is also true; if you are not satisfied with your photo afterwards, you will discover that a compositional rule was not respected

The problem is that most photographers do NOT know the standards. Gestalt? Not at all. FIAP? Is that a car brand?

Or as my late father taught me more than 40 years ago: you can deviate from the rules once you have mastered them perfectly and you know why. Not because you don't know them...

Nando, no matter how you look at it, you almost automatically apply some kind of composition rule.
Photographing by feel is highly subjective. If my feeling tells me to take a photo in a certain way, then your feeling tells you that photo isn't good.
If I take a photo with 4 trees in it, you will say that I should have taken a photo with 3 trees in it instead, because you will say: an odd number works better for a viewer.
What about my feeling then? Maybe the landscape is such that 4 trees can work, or the landscape is such that to take a beautiful photo of it you cannot avoid including 4 trees in the frame. The viewer isn't there after all and doesn't see what falls outside the frame.
The same goes for choosing a viewpoint. Comments like: you should have chosen a higher viewpoint, or you could have taken a better photo from that boulder. Try doing that when you're in a wheelchair.
A viewer doesn't know under what circumstances a photo is or was taken. Whether you use rules or, as you say: just take a photo by feel. The latter is without question a subjective choice, whether or not taking into account the circumstances on location and the photographer's possibilities.

Nice idea, those rules, but I've always just worked by feel, because I didn't know the rules. Still, I have a lot of prints that are worth looking at.....

I did not bring up the wheelchair as an excuse for a composition. You are making that of it. I bring it up as a limiting factor compared to a photographer who can go wherever he/she wants.
An example: The Opal Coast. If you want to take photos of the chalk cliffs, I notice that the most impressive photos have been taken from a beach. Unfortunately, those beaches are 99% only accessible on foot. You yourself already indicated that the workshop you gave on the Opal Coast is not suitable for wheelchair users.
That also means that it becomes difficult to make beautiful compositions because the desired viewpoint is not accessible. Of course, that does not mean that there are not plenty of other beautiful photos to take. However, you do not come home with the photos you would like to take.
A wheelchair is therefore not an excuse for an inferior composition, but a limiting factor.
But understand me correctly. I am not blaming you for anything. I am only trying to make it clear that there can be limiting factors that sometimes make an ideal composition impossible. One photographer has to deal with them more than another.
It is so easy to say: taking one step to the left or right, or choosing a higher or lower viewpoint, would have been a better choice. Because I do not know the circumstances, I will never make comments like that.
Finally Nando, I am trying to make people think. That there are also people with disabilities who take photographs. That they would also like to attend a workshop sometime, but always run into accessibility issues. Many people simply do not think about it. It is my goal to make everyone aware of this. Nando, I really appreciate you enormously. As a photographer, as a course instructor, but also as a person. Do not see my comments as a personal attack, but as a discussion in which you can and may have differing opinions. You also make me think. Important too, right?

But something else for a moment.
Regarding making a composition, I notice that a great many photographers put the main subject in the center. To me, that is often boring. Look, that is where feeling comes into play. Feeling is subjective by definition. I find it much more exciting when the main subject is NOT in the center. Somewhere else in the image instead. That means that the viewer has to look for the main subject, which is nevertheless clearly present. Meanwhile, the viewer's eye has moved through the entire photo. There you have another one of those rules: use the lines in the image to lead the viewer through the image to the main subject.

After all these views on composition theory, I would still like to formulate a mere thought: before I have taken a photo, I have visited the location and already formed some idea of how and when I am going to take this photo. Then I come back and when all the requirements I have set for myself have been fulfilled, I take the photo. Hence perhaps why I take so few photos. Is this perhaps not equivalent to the mindset of the photographer who works more on intuition and normally also takes many more photos than I do?

Robert Frank/Robert Capa/Henri Cartier Besson (Behind the Gare S/L)/William Klein/ Bruce Gilden....do you want more names? I just want to point out that composition rules certainly don't apply to everyone, nor to me. That you can also hold attention for your photo in other ways.

I like looking at photos and photobooks, but also online. As soon as I hear a name, I often Google it. So for example Robert Frank with his series The Americans, an attack on the composition rules that applied at the time, he didn't want that and consciously chose a different path. Wonderful photos to look at, straight from life. But you undoubtedly know those already.

https://davidcampany.com/robert-frank-the-instantaneous-reaction-to-oneself/

And furthermore you are right, although I also sometimes think that with some people, using or not using comp.rules happens unthinkingly and naturally. It happens by itself, so to speak.

Jeannet, you refer to a site and when I look at the photos in that book, I find that compositional rules are clearly recognizable. So don't say that the photographer doesn't use compositional rules, consciously or unconsciously.