DAWN BREAKS AND THE LANDSCAPE is covered in autumn leaves. The tips of the trees are swaying, but below the picture perfect scene is only disturbed by a man carrying a digital camera slowly making his way to a hill from where he plans to take a picture that celebrates nature's glory.

Digital landscape photography can be a lonely hobby, but it is lonely in the way that meditation is lonely. Like meditation, it is often best practised by those who are able to attain a sense of unity with the world in which they live. And like meditation, the gift it gives lives with the one who practises it for many years to come.

A good tip any landscape photographer can give you is to treat the landscape you are photographing less like a place you are passing through and more like a stranger you want to befriend. 

Flatter it and indulge in it, spend time with it and get to know it. But most of all look at it and find that one characteristic that makes it unique. Find its wrinkles and its warts, but also find its treasures and its smiles. Know it inside out, and then take your time to find a point of view from where you can show its best side.

As a young photographer, the biggest compliment I had ever received was when a friend looked at one of my holiday snaps and said: 'It looks like a postcard!'

I had spent ages taking that picture: walking this way and that, changing my point of view and changing my mind. Clearing up rubbish and setting up my tripod, then, finally, when the shadows had lengthened, I released the shutter, hoping that I'd done it justice, and when I heard it likened to a postcard, I felt that I succeeded.

I still have that old, slightly faded picture of an unnamed stream in the South African Drakensberg, and it is still one of my favourites.

But the beauty of landscape photography is that no matter how many times you achieve perfection, no matter how often you come home with a uniquely descriptive picture, the next time you go out you have to start from scratch and do it all over again.

Tips for finding worthy digital landscapes

A question many city-bound photographers often ask themselves is this: “Where do you find great landscapes?”

'Oh,' I hear you say, 'that's easy, in the great outdoors.'

True, true, fair enough, landscapes are generally found outside. But do they have to be taken in the wilderness? Can a town be a landscape? Surely a little village in the Cottage rich Cotswold region of England can be photographed as a landscape.

So, then, perhaps a landscape is a picture of a beautiful place...

The thing is, I have seen, and indeed I have taken many beautiful landscape photographs in very unlikely places, like graveyards or industrial areas. Like a sunset over a ghetto, with people going about their daily chores while nature’s immaculate beauty unfolds around them.

And indeed, not all good landscape pictures need be beautiful. They can be dramatic, or spooky or lonely or rough. The range of emotions it is possible to stir is only limited by the range of different landscapes in the world, which is to say as many as the sands of the sea.

A landscape photograph is one that shows the character of a place, rather than of a person or object. And a good landscape photograph is one that makes the viewer feel a certain sense of compassion for the place that he or she is looking at.

The aim of a master landscape photographer is never to impose his vision on the scene in front of him. True, you do need to put your personal stamp on it, showing it the way you see it, but a landscape picture is only worthy of the name if it tells you something of the landscape, not of yourself.

If you have visited a place and were able to coax meaning out of it, able to make it tell a story like a Cezanne painting does, then you know you have been successful.

In some sense, finding a place to photograph is less about where you are, than about how you look at the world. Don't think for a second that the area where you live is no good for great landscape pictures. It's simply a case of YOU needing to look at it with fresh eyes, as a traveler would.