ONE MISTAKE A LOT OF PHOTOGRAPHERS MAKE when photographing landscapes, is to climb on a hill and to try to take a picture of the whole world.

And what they inevitably end up with is wide expanse of nothing overlooked by a featureless pale blue sky.

The trick in photographing landscapes is to focus on details. I love dramatic skies and if I get up in the morning and see either a pale cloudless sky or a dull grey one, with cloud cover three thousand foot deep, I don’t even bother taking my camera.

But a photograph of a sky is only as good as its foreground. It’s a strange quirk of humanity that we adore pictures of beautiful clouds, yet we don’t give a second glance to a picture showing nothing but the clouds themselves.

The nifty little tip I’m trying to convey is that if you take a wide angle lens and get close in to some abstract foreground focal point while keeping the vast expanse of nature’s glorious roof in the background, you will give your viewers an object to look at, something to draw their eye in, while all the while, what you are really showing them is the sky.

And speaking of the heavens, another common mistake encountered among digital landscape photography enthusiasts is that of the central horizon. The natural thing to do when one picks up a camera is to point it straight ahead of you, standing upright and at eye level, with the horizon splitting the digital camera’s viewfinder into two halves.

This makes for very bland pictures.

A much better idea is to look at the scene, and to decide what you like more, the heavens above or the earth below, and then to give one or the other more prominence in the picture. You can do this by tilting the camera up or down. It is a somewhat flexible rule that you should always leave a little band of the horizon in the frame to give visual context to the picture. A photograph, especially one of the sky, which does not even include a small strip of the earth can often leave the viewer lost and confused.

Tip: Grovel for good digital landscapes

Oscar Wilde once said: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Clearly the man had the heart of a photographer.

One of my favourite things about a digital camera is it they has no sense of smell. Often I had stuck in places where there was an unbearable stench, and yet I returned with a picture at which no-one would turn up their noses.

Picture this: you are on a farm. You spot a beautiful sunset. Great, now all you need is foreground interest. There is an old, creaky gate nearby. Perfect. But in order to get the sky in background of your photograph, you will have to lie down, flat on your stomach in front of the gate. That’s the only way that you can get a low enough point of view.

Here’s the problem, it has been raining, and cows have been trampling through the gate. The ground is muddy and wet and there’s a fresh heap of steaming dung 2 foot away.

Guess what… the camera doesn’t mind and neither does the viewer. All they will see is the finished product. No-one is going to praise you for the trouble you went through, nor for the cold you endured. The only thing you will be judged on is the final result. They will have no idea of the hardship you had to go through in order to get your picture, and often the best point of view of the stars, as our friend Oscar so pointedly noted, is from the gutter.

So the best tip anyone can give you is to get your camera in the perfect position for the point of view you are looking for. It doesn’t matter if you have to stand on top of a telegraph pole, balancing on one leg, or whether you grovel in the dirt with ants climbing up your nose. All of this is a thousand times more endurable than a bland and monotonous picture.