It doesn’t matter whether you are shooting landscape or portrait photos (in terms of orientation), you can apply the Rules of Third and the concept of vanishing point, like I did in Photo 1. Draw those imaginary lines in this photo separating it into nine parts, and you can see that I placed the vanishing point at the upper two-thirds section of the photo, making the photo more interesting. Of course, shooting it with a 17-40mm lens made the perspective of this photo strong in itself. But you can always add interest by putting more thought into the composition.
Placement of human subjects
You have seen many photos without a human subject. Here is one that included a living subject. He is placed in the center of the photo. But that is not why he grabs your attention. You can see the vanishing point at the end of this pedestrian road. And this man is placed along the lines that led to the vanishing point. That makes him more prominent than anything else in the photo.
Sometimes we cannot see the vanishing point in a photo but the strong perspective is still there. Photo 3 is an example of that. It is the lines of this house that create the tension or perspective of the photo. But without the red mailbox the photo would be less eye-catching. You can tell why the red mailbox is so important, because anything placed at this point, the two-thirds section of a photo, would be as prominent. If the mailbox was replaced by a person/model, he/she would be the focus of attention. In that case, you could ask your model to look in different directions, and see how his/her line of sight affects the look and feel of the photo.
|Photo 1||Photo 2||Photo 3|
|Camera||Canon EOS 5D||1||1||1|
|Lens||EF 17-40mm f4L IS USM||1||1||1|