The colour green

We love the way this portrait is full of green without making the subject look unnatural. The model's peachy skin and coral dress contrast with the gentle blue-green of the background (the shades being roughly at opposite sides of the colour wheel). Her dark hair provides the strongest contrast in what is otherwise a softly-toned image, and the blue-green highlights in it help merge her with her detail-less setting. The whole thing feels as delicate as the soap bubbles the girl is blowing.

Deceptively simple, this photograph is very cleverly composed. The boat reaches two-thirds of the way up the frame, and the sharp horizontal lines of the struts in the boat form a visual ladder from the dark foreground to the hazy, bleached-out river beyond. The image has clearly benefited from post-production work to ensure the boat is completely sharp while the water softens, and also to bring out the greens and yellows. But it works because so much would have had green and yellow tinges already.

The theme was colour green, and this shot of dew drops on spider's web certainly is that, though the repetition of the wider scene within each drop of water brings other colours into the image. The focussing is beautifully done: the central dew drops are sharp and the strands of the web are clear to see, while the depth of field is just shallow enough to blur the outer drops, drawing your eye to the sharp ones. This is an image that's at once both highly stylised and completely natural - we loved it!

This image is bursting with greenness as the pod is with peas! Pods don't burst naturally like this, so the photographer has obviously spent some time and effort to pop it without knocking all the peas out or spoiling the outside. It's also been carefully shot to include nothing but more greenery in the background. The exposure has been well considered, because there's a good range of tones from near-black in the background to almost white at the pod's tip. A smashing shot.

This mouthwatering photo really caught our eye. Food can be tremendously difficult to photograph, and what looks like an artless scattering of greens is actually very carefully composed, with a neat layer of courgettes forming a solid background for the broccoli and asparagus. Everything's cut to roughly the same size so no one element dominates the shot. There's enough light to glint off the oil and produce juicy highlights, and the pure white backdrop means there's nothing to distract from the food, not even a simple shadow. Beautifully done.