Black and white landscapes

Gary's nailed the composition of this shot placing the lone tree about a third of the way in from the right side and using the naturally occurring lead-in lines of the ridges which zig-zag through the scene and lead to the sky. There's a brilliant amount of depth from the tree in the foreground all the way to the sky in the background and the clean composition really helps the tree to stand out as the obvious focal point.

This is a fantastic landscape that incorporates a human element as the focal point and the strong backlighting which has turned these kids racing with tyres into silhouette works very strongly. We also love Nguyen's low angle that's allowed him to get closer to the lines in the sand dunes which almost act as lead-in lines to direct the viewer's eye towards the horizon. Great job!

Cath's brilliant shot here shows that you don't always need a wide angle lens to photograph landscapes, sometimes zooming in on a specific detail, such as this snow capped peak works just as well. The contrast in this scene is fantastic with the sky turned totally black and the snowy highlights standing out from the mountain ridges. It has an abstract quality that almost makes it look like an aerial drone shot at first glance. Great job!

We're so used to seeing landscapes with a super deep depth-of-field so Mark's image stood out and caught our eye because he decided to use a wide aperture of f/1.4 to focus on the bench and blur the background. This works well and certainly isn't experimented with enough in this genre so props to Mark for trying something a bit different!

Sandi's image has a fantastic ethereal and ghostly vibe to it that works perfectly with the black and white toning. The mist and silhouetted trees around the scene give this shot loads of depth and the church has been positioned off centre and stands out from the misty foreground strongly.