I am admittedly one of the worst landscape photographers I know. I don't seem to see the lines and the points of interest when I go to shoot that really accomplished landscapers seem to get. The funny thing is that if I'm driving I seem to always see light and subjects that intrigue me at 70mph but once i sit still with the tripod and my camera i lose the inspiration. 

Regardless there is something that of late I have been doing that I enjoy and that is finding something in the foreground of my shot and lighting it the way that I would light a model in the same situation. Mostly I'm using umbrellas in this situation since i want a nice simulated sun light but I have also used the Rogue Grids for this situation since they can bring focus solely to the object in the shot that I want lit. Here are a few examples.

Here are examples where I used a westcott apollo strip box to bring attention to the sole (forgive my lack of tree knowledge) tree amongst all the scrub and cacti on the plane in front of the mountain. The same reasons I would use for flash with a model apply here. I wanted to use a large aperture to reduce the depth of field as much as I could knowing that the wide angle I'm shooting with is going to inherently going to produce lots of focus in the image. Using the fast aperture is generally going to blow out the sky and the mountains in the background but by using flash on the foreground to light that evenly with the sky and shooting at a fast shutter speed I was able to keep all the detail in a very interesting sky. The image below is the same set up and reasoning to bring both pop and direction to the yellow flowers so that they stand out amongst the earth tones of the hill and the dark blue sky.

These two images are more consistent with my street shooting techniques but are sill in the landscape family. The blue of the mechanical bull device matched the sky to my eye and the yellow was a nice (to me) diversion from the overall scene so i wanted those to be the focal point for the viewer. The old car on the right (which had someone in it saying "don't take my picture!") I wanted to capture more of but couldn't. The blue sky and the man putting a mannequin on the bull were all going to draw interest with more than a moment looking at the image but the control device to me was the focus of the image. In the image below I found a small group of trees along the coast of the La Jolla beach front that I thought looked like living drift wood. I Was intrigued but they were in shadow under the canopy of their leaves. I wanted to capture the blueness of the sky, the palms trees stark against the white clouds but what i really wanted to see was the textures in the wood that drew me to the subject in the first place. The only way i could achieve all of that in this scene was to expose the sky and palms and then light the tree's with the flash. The day was a bit windy so I was unable to use any modifier on this having already destroyed two umbrellas during the week. I zoomed the flash head to it's widest setting and held it out to the left with my non shooting hand and shot away. If I had a tripod or an assistant for the flash I may have shot this in multiple exposures to light various areas of the branches and canopy. This would have also allowed me to use a smaller aperture to get even more detail in the tree.