Lots of my landscape pictures are taken while I am out walking our dogs.  Clearly I am not the sort of dedicated landscape photographer who sets up a camera and waits patiently for hours at a time, until the light is just right.  My canine companions would not tolerate that.  As it is, they get fed up very quickly when I want to stop and find the right place for a picture.   Sometimes indeed I have to hold on to their leads with one hand, the camera in the other to keep the pair of them out of mischief.

Perhaps I have invented a new category of photography, action landscape?

Landscape pictures are usually improved with a strong foreground interest.  I will often try to get one of the dogs to wait in the correct position in the foreground of my shot.  But it is not as easy as it sounds.  If I get Lily  into the “right” position for me and then call her to look round at me or get her face up from where she is sniffing, she will often just come trotting to me.   Poppy is worse, she is so excitable, bounding all over the place.  I have lots of pictures with dogs, looking away, sniffing the grass, running towards me or worse.

Here is an example of a shot which went wrong.  I was out at the Forvie National Nature Reserve on a lovely sunny day and I found this view south, over Broad Haven towards Aberdeen in the far distance.  Try as I could, I was not able to get the dogs into a good position, and what I had hoped would be a great picture, was a failure

I tried cropping the dogs out of the frame, but I felt the picture was not so good without the full sweep of the sand.

Photoshop came to the rescue, however, and I managed to remove the dogs.   This is the edited picture I have posted on Facebook today.

It is not often that I can get Lily to look at the camera, so my signature landscape shot has a Shi Tzu looking at the view, rather than at the camera.   Here are a couple of examples.