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First of all hi and welcome to Crestock.

I just had a look at your images. They tend to be a little soft and the sky shows some kind of noise that seems to be a result from post production.

I think the softness is due to the used f-stops of 13 and 14 on the relatively small sensor size. We inspectors discussed lately that the diffraction seems to be pretty evident with some camera bodies that have a crop sensor.

At best you make a test: use a tripod, manual exposure, manual focus and make a series of images with different f-stops (adjusting the shutter speed accordingly). Then look at the images at 100%. I´m pretty sure you will be amazed.

Regarding the sky: try to avoid as much post production as possible. Use RAW, convert it to 16bit tiff, and finally only adjust what´s necessary before you convert to 8bit jpg. If you don´t already do so - use a polarizer to increase blue skies.

If it were my pictures I would also have worked in the levels - the overall appearance is a little dull.

Hope that helps.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. It is very helpful.

As it turns out the provide reasons are similar to problems I noticed with other photos of mine.
I have other photos showing this "noise" like patterns in the skies. I didn't notice it with these two, but I can understand it being the case.
I didn't adjust levels since I had bad experience with exactly this problem on other photos. It seems to make the pattern more visible.

As far as I could tell, the f-stop range from 10-16 seemed to be most optimal for my lens (Nikkor 18-70 kit lens) and camera Nikon D70s. Although most tests I did are with closer focusing (2-3 m) and not with landscapes. So I'll try to do another test on that.

I assume that my camera and lens are capable of producing a noise free sky at iso 100, without me having to do noise reduction. I prefer to do the least amount of PP possible. So I guess I have to learn to take better pictures.

Forgot to add: I use lightroom for processing and converting from RAW to jpg. And the second photo was taken with tripod and polarizer.

Paul

BTW: my compliments on the excellent support you guys provide on these forums. It makes these forums very informative and welcoming.

Thanks Paul,
we´re looking forward to see more of your work. You know, we are not the bad guys that are happy to reject an image - in fact it is vice versa - we love to inspect great images and it is much more fun when you can accept almost any image of a contributor than thinking about what of the many rejection reasons one has to use.

This is very true.  We understand how much time goes into not only shooting, but editing and keywording images.  We're all much happier accepting great images!

                                           Dana

:D I will try making you guys and girls happy. Bought myself a 50mm 1.8 yesterday, so I should be able to see things a little sharper now. Now all I have to do is get creative with it. ;) Anyone has some creativity for sale?

Cheers

Paul