I recently had an assignment to illustrate a story about the city studying possible changes in the parking downtown. I needed to get shot of a one hour parking sign good enough to be "lead art".

Which meant that the shot had to be interesting enough to run as the largest picture on a section front, "anchoring" the page. And-- parking signs themselves being very uninteresting, and interesting things rarely happening around them-- that meant I needed to do something artful with the inanimate subject matter.

In this case, the artful something was to put together a picture which is complex, but not too messy. And it's layered, meaning that the various elements are at various distances. So it's busy, but your eye is led to the sign.

Which leads me to a favorite compositional style, which I call "busy, but lead the eye".

Often such a shot does not have a single main element.

In the shot above of a young lieutenant trying to reassure a skeptical shiite family in Baghdad, your eye hops around to the various persons, each one of more or less equal importance.

In the Scaleburgers shot, the hut and the sign are the most important elements, even if you don't notice them until after you look at the enlivening cavalcade of people and food.

I suppose I'd have liked it better if the hut was dead center. Fyi, this shot never ran because there was a better one, albeit with out this compositional style.

In the shot of Ardretta Jones and her boys, Jamarae happens to be visually dominant. This one isn't quite so busy, but it certainly leads my eye around and around.