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The light and the angles and the clarity to the hills of Martin Down in Wiltshire, UK, called for some time spent looking and sharing some thoughts about the composition tips and the effects of foreground on the background.

With Image One, I was down low, with my phone camera upside down to get the lens at a 'snail-height. I checked the image, everything was in focus, mind, body, and shell, but not the eye stalk with the little beady at the tip.

There was a moment in the cooking where quite a lot of moisture was rising from the mix. It provides a good illustration of one of the hazards of photographing food, but also the same thing can be a benefit.

Image One, is the original image I took before I noticed the flower poking out from the cliff. In itself made quite dramatic by the sharp vertical shadow pointing up towards the setting sun, with quite good visual balance overall - the lighter but larger rocks to the left, countering the smaller but darker ones on the right.

A few days ago I took a number of photographs of the same small clump of flowers, initially from the same angle, to share with you the effect of choosing the point of focus by selecting a different flower to focus on, and how that alters both the whole image and our mental response to it.

With Image Two, I've changed the angle slightly, and cropped in enough to exclude the candlestick. The brain is now much more focused than previously, when it may have been rather distracted. Because of the background I didn't lower the camera angle, or there would have been too much extraneous junk in the background, and the artificial light, in the form of a spotlight, would have caught the surface of the lens and caused undesirable internal reflections leading to flare

1. Fog hides distractions. Third picture, misty day is like you've slung a big sheet from a couple of helicopters; background gone, eye focuses on the tree. 2. Try black and white I've turned both images to monochrome, you can see that the colour complicates the image too much. 3. Use roads as leading lines Oh, and the road running from either sides, makes visual use of the interesting thirds, and takes the eye straight towards the subject.