I'm not sure i knew your heritage. The mystery i just read, set in the 1500s, contrasted the merchants with their German background with the Finnic people who were there before the Germans Christianized the area. There seemed to be a bit of the frontier to the location.

It interests me that composition is what you identify as a pre-digital skill. It seems to me one that you can work on with any image recording tool. It's other techniques around balancing lighting, depth of field, and shutter speed and selecting the right lens that seem harder encourage someone to learn.