Summer landscapes

With a landscape sometimes you want to show as much as possible, and sometimes you should leave a little to the imagination. By focussing on the poppies, this photographer has removed any contrasting features from the image, and restricted the colour palette to red and green – yet the flowers themselves are a real sign of summer, and the blurred ones in the background show you how far into the landscape they go. By waiting for the sun to be low in the sky, the photographer has ensured that the light is a gentle gold that backlights the flowers and buds perfectly.

Everyone who takes landscape photos will tell you how critical the right light is, and that's exemplified in this shot, where the shape of the landscape is shown not by a horizon, but by shadows. As well as showing the curves of the land, the strong light brings out the lines in the crops at the back of the scene and the stippled tufts of grass at the front. The lone black cow gives a sense of scale, without adding extra colour to distract from the broad 'brushstrokes' of green.

Think of summer and you think of holidays, and this landscape shot conveys the feeling of 'getting away from it all' perfectly. We loved the progression from pebbly foreground to the water and boat to the slightly misty mountains in the distance: the photographer has created a scene that you feel you could just step straight into. Positioning the boat slightly off-centre really helps the composition too - if it were central, it would form a block between the viewer and the background.

British country scenes are incredibly difficult to do well: the gentle hills and soft colours can translate into images that feel dreadfully flat. That makes this picture all the more impressive. The photographer has wisely resisted any impulse to turn the grass an unnatural shade of green or burn extra detail into the clouds, relying instead on light and composition to do the work. The tree provides a strong shadow, which introduces pleasing contrast to the foreground, while the diagonal line formed by the tree and three sheep breaks up the horizontal lines of the foreground, horizon and sky. The composition feels like that of a classic landscape painting by Constable.

An idyllic summer scene... or is it? This image tells the story of the land, but if you look carefully, you'll see that what appears to be mist is actually plumes of smoke rising between the trees. It is summer, the land is dry, and the woods are burning. The smoke has also helped to divide the scene, veiling the land immediately before and after the midground slope, leaving you with clearly defined foreground, midground and background areas, and forming a zigzag that draws your eye back through the centre of the image.