Are there some rules that you ought to follow - and perhaps break, once you know them?
There are indeed rules to composition, and all the elements of art, and you've hit the nail on the head - the purpose of learning them is to know when you are breaking them.

- A single figure in an image placed on the dead center -- or perhaps on the golden mean
The golden mean is a mathmatically determined set of lines on your composition; some Renaissance guy got all obsessive about determining the GM's exact value. I just treat it like a range, a sort of quadrant in a comp. I think the "rule of thirds" is pretty close - someone correct me if I'm wrong here.

The relationship between foreground and background
Basically, elements in the foreground pop out, and elements in the background recede. There's more to it than that probably, but you'll have to get it from someone else. :)

Making the image dynamic, yet balanced
Creating an interesting path for the eye to follow
Etc.
Creating a path for the eye to follow is probably the most crucial element of composition, once the more egregious no-nos are dispensed with (tangents, horrible imbalance, etc.)

What do you think?
I think it's an interesting topic. I'll throw two more considerations; negative and positive space, and composition vs. design. Oh yes, I almost forgot focal points. FPs are probably the most important thing to understand about composition. You start with the idea that you want a focal point (or a focal region), and then you start considering all the things that contribute to your chosen point/region as focal point. There are tons of such things; contrast, detail, color, the aforementioned flow lines, species bias (the face of an animal demands more attention from a viewer than a normal object, and an anthropomorphic face demands still more attention, and the eyes are the focal point of any face, etc.), and more.

Rules are made to be broken :)
Rules are made to be understood before they're broken. That's like one of the axioms of art.

Someone once told me, and I believe it's true, that setting a figure in the centre of a picture makes for a very formal, portrait-style image, whereas setting them to one side gives a more natural feel.
Yes, dead-center is a bit boring. If one is working on a portrait where the subject must be in the center, make it subtly off-center; put one eye or the other at dead-center, for example.

Oh yeah, since I'm just brain-dumping here, I can't forget the all-important L-shape; L-shapes are very strong compositional tools. Think of the overall composition, not of lots of little L-shapes stuck here and there. It's a lot easier to illustrate this concept than it is to describe it. Message edited on: 09/29/2004 11:43

Message edited on: 09/29/2004 11:55