iirc Galen Rowell wrote that the problem he saw most frequently during photography workshops was too much foreground; and it didn't seem to matter how often he explained what was wrong using other peoples photographs, people only started to change what they were doing when he made them see how the picture they were framing would look without all that foreground.
There's an essay by Michael(?) somewhere on this website which suggests that the photographer ask themselves this question when taking a photograph "What is the photograph about?" And it is a good question to ask!
To look at some of the photos in the story...
- is the image from Lago Pehoe about the mountains and clouds or is it about the water washing over the rocks in the foreground? The aquamarine colour of the lake is squashed between the shoreline and the breaking wave in the middle of the picture. it happens that the shape of the rock in the lower right complements the shape of the mountains and clouds in the upper right ... but is the image about the top half or the bottom half? Compare the image if you crop the rocks out of the bottom part of the image...
- Betty's Bay is a better example of gratuitous foreground content adding ... what value? Crop it out (or most of it out) and the image becomes about something: the sunset.
- And again with the next image... lots of foreground but what is the photograph about? The foreground or the rocky ridge line? I can't see any symmetries or complimentary shapes here.
... and the inclusion of the moon in the bottom image... if you crop lots of sky (and the moon) out, it becomes a more intense image. Crop it until the sky-land barrier is at the half way point up the image."
Conversely the "Big Daddy" picture is perfect for what it does.
https://luminous-landscape.com/understanding-the-art-of-cropping/And that's where the "What is The Image About?" comes from! Oh, that's from 2007 ... I thought it was much more recent than that :*)