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The theme for the August round of our monthly photography competition was "The Power of Nature", which proved to be another popular subject, drawing a huge number of exceptionally good entries. With the number of contestants - and the quality of the entries - again boosted by visitors from Photographycompetitions.net and by the lure of the great prizes on offer from Panasonic and SanDisk, we again received several hundred submissions. If this keeps up I'm going to need a bigger inbox!

A theme like "The Power of Nature" is quite abstract, so people naturally interpreted it in different ways, some with carefully studied shots, others with a more journalistic style, while some took a more light-hearted approach. Nobody likes a good laugh more than I do, except perhaps my wife, and some of her friends…and possibly last month's prize winner Paul Cook of Glasgow, who this month sent in this humorous composition on the power of gravity. "Inspired by Newton's laws of gravity, I decided to enlist the help of my girlfriend to set up this "re-enactment" of Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of the powers of nature - in this case gravity - using a bit of Alice in Wonderland/Wizard of Oz inspiration for the overall effect." Paul used his Nikon D200 to capture the photo.

The holiday season down here in south-west England has been pretty terrible this year, but that didn't stop Richard Smith of London from snapping this excellent picture at Bedruthen Steps in Cornwall in August. Proving that you don't need the latest digital SLR to take a good picture, Richard used his Casio EX-Z750, a seven megapixel compact launched in 2005, to take this shot of his sons and their friend in one the spectacular caves that the sea has eroded in the cliffs of the Cornish coast.

HDR photography has become very popular recently, and in fact it is becoming somewhat over-used. It's a technique that's not always suitable for every subject and is widely abused, but in the right hands there's no doubt that it can produce stunning results, as ably demonstrated here by Vishesh Sood of Cape Town, South Africa. "The image was taken in a small fishing village in Cape Town, South Africa around 7:30am in the morning. 3 separate images were taken using bracketed exposure on a Nikon D90 with an 18-105mm kit lens. The separate images were then compiled later on using Photomatix software to generate an HDR image, which was subsequently post-processed in Adobe Lightroom with final sharpening in Adobe Photoshop CS2."

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