A few of you who follow me on Facebook or Flickr will see I've had a couple of recent attempts at taking photos of the stars. This was all sparked by me hearing about the Perseid Meteor Shower. I've never heard of it before this year - it is an annual shower, that provides regular and spectacular meteors for us viewing down here on Earth. Every year it peaks around the 11th of August, and I decided to try and catch my own meteor on camera.

The biggest mistakes made by beginners starting out in landscape photography, are in composition. In my opinion, it is one of the most important things to get right "in camera". Composition (aside from a little cropping) cannot be fixed in post processing. Nothing you do on the computer is going to change how you arranged the scene in the viewfinder.

Tweaks can be made, of course - e.g. cloning out intrusive branches or straightening the horizon but generally, composition must be right at the time of the shot.