You asked for feedback, so now you will get some more or less ordered thoughts.
For me a lot of your images looks for me a bit boring, because they look like the images I do when hiking in the holidays. I asked myself why. And I think it is because I tend to do hiking at good weather and not to early or to late and don’t leave the paths. (My excuse is the family. )
But your goal is not hiking with the family, but making great photos, so you have to leave your comfort zone.
I know your excuse is no car. But at least in Germany it is allow to sleep in the forest without a tent. And if you ask a farmer it is usually no problem to sleep somewhere on his ground with a tent. Just try it, you will get really nice images and a good story for free.
This is by the way a nice podcast with good outdoor tips: https://www.christofoerster.com/freiraus
I for example went up last saturday at 4 o’clock, rode 30 minutes with the bike to see the sunrise and was back at eight, with bread rolls for the family. You will get images like this not edited phone image:
I like this photo because it is easy to read. The hay is pointing to the farmer, from there I can move on to the tractor and then to the sky. This even tells a story (hay harvesting) great! But what do you want to tell me with the street on the left and the fence on the right? You could simply cut it of.
And here an other really nice one with is it is easy to read and has a story (I’m going my way):
And here an image I don’t understand. More then 1/4 is green noise. There is a river, but where is he coming from, and where does he go? My eyes find no rest, I don’t see a story here to tell.
Could be that your question was taken as rhetorical?
I agree that several of the shots appear to be a flood of color, no contrast, no subject. The sort of shots you might take while out on a walk on a beautiful day where the atmosphere of the day moves you to capture something you’re feeling but which isn’t there when viewed later flat on a screen.
In this photo, the main subjects are clearly the rocks. But I wanted to show how huge they are, so I included the trees. I also have some shots where the focus is on the rocks (they fill the whole frame) and the trees are cropped, but those are just not good. I really hope you can imagine how big everything is in this photo. I was there and I thought a few minutes about how best capture the rocks. I mean it was really challenging.
This region / hiking trail is beautiful but not photogenic at all from my point of view. I mean the red color of the river is really ugly, among other things. Basically there are nowhere nice views that are not blocked by trees. I am even surprized that I have some acceptable shots.
The viewing angle is not optimal in some photos but there was no way to get a better one, at least without a drone or a special telescope tripod or standing in the water something like that.
I did not answer to this earlier because I thought that I had enough attention. But there are still some editable/uploadable shots.
However I hope that you understand that space/illusionism thing too.
Feel free to think a little about what you shoud look at first. But I think it’s not difficult. In those other photos you quoted the main subject is the tree.
I don’t think the framing or your wide angle are doing much to emphasize the size of the rocks. In fact, including the whole tree makes the rocks look smaller, and the wide angle lens emphasizes the height of the tree, not the size of the rocks.
Again, it is your job as the artist to use your work to communicate with me.
Now, this may be due to the vertical composition and my inability to display it all without scrolling, but I really didn’t notice the rocks until you pointed them out… Really, I think, the trees lead you to the sky.
In a scene like this, I look for a foreground->background line to lead me from the first noticed thing to the subject. I make use of fallen trees for this sometimes, but it doesn’t have to be a single object; a line of flowers would also do. If not a line, just a foreground object one would know to be small, like a single flower or a bush. In that, I probably spent too much of my youth regarding the works of David Muench in Arizona Highways magazine…
I think I would have ditched the rocks and concentrated on the trees. Better composition lines in them…
Maybe, just maybe, lie on the ground with my head just in front of the left rock, and shoot straight up, with the tree lines converging to a point in the sky.
I think the answer is “lighting.” Some light directly on the rock faces would illuminate. If you’re talking about a controlled light source like a flash, then you could direct that light source mostly at the rocks.
you know what: I did the exact opposit: I had an ND4 filter on the lens all the time - because of the water. I was too lazy to crew it on an off all the time so I figured higher iso in the shadow is better than f22 in the sunlight. Actually I am thinking of buying an ND fader. Indeed I think I made good experineces with the ND4 filter at sunny weather. And in many cases actually more than ND4 would be optimal so the lens can be opened to f8 or f5.6. I think my lens is the sharpest at f5.6. Everything above f11 is bad.
But maybe in this case a flash would have been good, however I am not really a flash fan. I guess then it would have been necessary to adjust the different white balances in the different areas of the photo in darktable.
The boulders don’t appear to be the subject of your composition because the camera is facing upward, the opposite direction gravity, erosion and growth is moving them toward (downward and horizontally).
Edit What is missing is a sense of relief and a variety of illumination on your subject.
If you don’t like flash, there are many tools that will tell you the angle and direction of the sun so you can plan your shoots. I use those tools before almost every shoot I travel for.
I had the same experience…the converging lines of the trees led my eyes up, up and away to a sky that was largely blocked by the tops of the trees. Were there other large rocks anywhere that really stood out, rather than being mingled in with trees, bushes and a hillside?
I agree the other shot had nicer composition, but I too thought it was about accentuating the height of the trees. This one is more clearly about the rocks.
I agree the rocks would be better photographed with light on the surface facing the camera. For this one it might have been beneficial to climb up that hill a little and shoot at about 90 degree angle from where you took this photo.
I also think you could use the wide angle lens differently. Many people use wide angles just to try and fit everything in, but in doing so, its hard to get really nice balance and composition of all elements in the frame. To me, the real advantage of wide angles is the way they elongate depth, but in order to take advantage of that you have to get right up close to objects. So to emphasize the size of boulders with a wide angle, I would have stood much closer to them. It would also help with your issue of having less objects blocking the frame.
ND4 should be great for bright sunshine. It’s more difficult for high dynamic range shots like you have here, with deep shadows under the trees and bright highlights in the sky. Everything here looks well exposed but this could be why you were having noise issues in processing. Given you are often photographing the sky, graduated ND could be a good option. Have you also considered a polarising filter? Some of them can simply be twisted to increase or decrease the amount of reflected light you let through, so if you are lazy with filters, that would be simpler than having to take an nd on/off all the time.
I understood the poetry of trees you were capturing in some other shots people didn’t understand, but as they don’t stand out significantly from the background I can see why some see them as just a wash of green. This is where different lighting conditions would help.
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