Compositions are what photography is all about. It's kind of like the foundation, the cornerstone. If you don't have a good solid composition for your photo, then it's kind of like a fatal mistake with your photo. You can't recover from it like other photography mistakes. And let's talk about the five rules of compositions. Let's start out with balance and symmetry, and that's going to be my very first photo I'm going to take. And then from there I'll take the other four rules of composition. So rule number one is balance and symmetry. So that means that we want kind of an equal amount of weight on the left side of the photo as compared to the right side of the photo. And that's pretty easy with this composition. This lake is kind of made with a good bit of balance and symmetry, but I would line that up right there and that gives me equal balance on each side. It's kind of like there's an anchor on the left and an anchor on the right. The next rule is four grounds and take a look at this beautiful foreground and this just helps with the overall storytelling. I've got a tree on the left hand side and I don't want to have a tree just on one side that creates an imbalance. So I'll crop out that tree just by rotating the camera, move it a little bit left, get it down low, and there's a really interesting foreground there for the shot. So that's rule number two is have a nice non cluttered, non-busy, and non-textured foreground. Here's another example of foreground and I say this one doesn't work. It's too busy it's too too messy, too textured. So that's why I'm looking for something just smooth and non-textured for a foreground. And rule number three is the rule of thirds and I put this tree on the left one third line and it looks pretty good. But see if I were to put it over here it creates an imbalance. If I put it exactly in the middle it just doesn't look right. So I can put it on the right third or the left third and that is the rule of thirds. Rule of composition number four is reflections. Now we don't have the usual fantastic reflections here like we usually do but there are reflections. Look on the lake. On the right hand side you've got that whole set of trees there that are just nicely reflected there and on the left hand side the mountain is reflected. So whenever possible always go for the reflections if you possibly have them in your composition. So this composition here is using both balance and symmetry and reflections. So you can see that there's an equal amount of the trees reflected off the water and that gives that nice sense of balance and symmetry from top to bottom. And here's one more with the rule of thirds. The log is on the bottom one third line and extends out to the right one third line. In this one we've got a combination of reflections, rule of thirds and balance and symmetry. Looks great. Rule of composition number five and this one is my favorite. It is leading lines. Now you're going to say how can you find a leading line on a lake but check this out. There happens to be one log that's pointed out towards the lake. Got that really interesting rock triangular shape and the leading line creates something that points the viewers eye to the back of the photo. And I had that leading line on the left one third. So now what I'm doing is I am doing what I call rule stacking. And we're using all five rules of composition in one shot. We've got reflections. We have balance and symmetry. We have a beautiful foreground. We're using the rule of thirds and we're using leading lines. Look how nice that composition is. I mean it is just, it's gorgeous. Right about like that. Just a beautiful composition. And this is a beautiful photo. Those are the five rules of composition that I use for 95% of my compositions. And when you can composition rules stack like get the most or the highest number of compositions that are utilized in your frame, you're going to get an awesome photo. Now when I arrived at Moraine Lake for this photo shoot, I had an expectation of the type of photo that I wanted in my mind. I have been to Moraine Lake so many times and I've shot Moraine like this photo here in the summertime where you can clearly see the distant mountains. And this photo in the winter where again you can see the distant mountains. So for this photo shoot today, I had that same vision in my mind. I wanted to see the distant mountains and I wanted that big wide open vista in my composition. But when I arrived, it was completely cloudy and I could not see the distant mountains. So it required a real change in mindset for me as a photographer. I needed to completely change the composition that I was able to get for the conditions that were available on that day. So that's when I decided, okay, I'm going to combine the maximum number of rules of composition within one frame and I ended up with this one really fantastic composition. So let me show you the one tool in Lightroom and Photoshop that will also help you with your compositions. And it is an incredibly powerful tool. So here's the same photo in Lightroom and I applied one of my presets to the photo and after applying the preset, this is what it looks like. So it's a very quick edit and I added some really nice looking drama here, but we're not done. We need to change the composition. This is the photo as it came out of the camera. So let's click on the cropping tool and the cropping tool is a very underrated tool when it comes to adjusting compositions. Now if you hit oh on your keyboard, this is the crop overlay and you can change the type of crop overlay tool depending on the type of photo that you want. This one here is Rule of Thirds and I use this for the majority of my photos and I want to try and keep this leading line in adherence with the Rule of Thirds. So let's drag the cropping tool down and now we've got the horizon line at the end of the lake on the top third and we've also got the log at an intersection point in the Rule of Thirds. I find that this is a more powerful composition than the composition that I originally framed up when I was in the field. Now because I'm shooting video here, I need this to be a 16 by 9 aspect ratio because for YouTube videos, that is the aspect ratio that works with video in either 4k or 1080p. So with this new aspect ratio, this would be the composition here. It's still showing a little bit of the tree root, the stump and maybe that's a bit of a distraction. Maybe it's not. If I crop over top of it, it's going to make the photo even smaller and then move it over here and there's sort of a healthy balance. Now let's take a look at what this looks like. Click Done and we have a very nice composition there. Let's let's look at the size. Click I on the keyboard to see what is still left over and it's still 6400 pixels wide which is very large. I shot this with a Nikon D850 camera so there's still lots of room there. So there is a nice solid and powerful composition and I use the Rule of Thirds, I use the cropping tool and really the cropping tool is the most powerful tool that you can use to further adjust your compositions after you get home. So I know that we always say this but if you liked this video then please hit the like button, leave a comment and let me know what you thought about stacking the rules of composition and please do hit the subscribe button and the little bell beside it and I'll see you in my next video.