Rensberry.com
I have a friend who received a new camera for Christmas. In my opinion, to produce outstanding photos, the best thing to master is photo composition. There are some good rules to follow ... and then there are times to break them (but only with a purpose in mind).
Learning how to compose a photo is art. That is the draw to photography. Anyone can learn to edit photos on a computer, and that is an important skill to develop, but only the greatest photographers develop that photographic eye.
The following links are what I found to be a decent crash course on learning fundamentals of photo composition. Watch the videos, read the articles, but most importantly, take a lot of pictures and study which ones are really good and why they are good. Also, study the ones that you thought would be good, but just are not.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZVyNjKSr0M\[/embedyt\]
Here is another but different illustrative blog with similar points.
Lastly, one more blog post with explanations of why some common composition techniques work.
Should anyone want a book with examples to learn photo composition, try The Photographer's Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos.
For fun, my personal photography website.