Panoramic

This is a classic panorama, showing a broad sweep of a beautiful landscape. We saw a lot of these. However, this stands out because of careful composition: your eye is drawn to the pale mountain and its reflection, and the photographer has taken care to position them to one side of the frame, not smack-bang in the centre, drawing your eye sideways. This image has a foreground, with the lake leading visually from the foot of the mountain to where the viewer is standing, increasing the sense of depth. It's easy to shoot a landscape panorama that feels flat, whereas this one feels alive and engaging.

The forest and sky occupy roughly the bottom and top thirds of the frame in this scene, and while there's texture in both, there's not a detail that draws your attention, so plain landscape in the middle third would have resulted in quite a dull photo. By placing the mountain off to one side of the frame, the photographer has given the viewer a focus point. Removing most of the colour from the shot is a clever move; the angle of the light on the trees tells you it's sunset, so orange was the right tone to keep.

A classic view of Prague, this shot is helped greatly by the mist over the city. Any distracting smaller detail further back in the shot is faded out, allowing the viewer to focus on the strong dome at the bottom-right of the picture, and the interesting cluster of buildings in the middle ground on the left. The overall pink tone creates a dreamy atmosphere entirely in keeping with the historic buildings and lightly-rippling river. Reducing this shot to standard proportions would mean losing one of the points of interest on either side, or increasing the blank sky at the back or boring rooftops at the front. It only works as a panorama.

Without the hay bales, this panorama would be a boring landscape photo, even with the setting sun and warm colour of the sky. The bales connect the foreground (and the viewer) with the distance, and the three largest ones on the left form a neat diagonal line that counteracts the mostly-horizontal lines formed by the edge of the field and the landscape beyond. The three bales form a strong line, but the brightness of the sun is enough to pull your eye back into the picture, and balances out both halves of the shot. We loved the way a relatively commonplace subject has been used to create a dynamic panorama.