As Misha said, the art is in the eye, not the machine. It has been my experience that digital cameras have a narrow exposure latitude, but so does slide film, and to a lesser extent color neg film. If the exposure is set for the highlights the shadows will go to black, if set to retain detail in the shadow, highlights will get blown out. The trick is to expose someplace in-between, without turning the whole thing into mud. Of course you can always tweak the levels and curves in the software, but the detail has to be there first. To say that a decent digital cannot take a good landscape is BS. Learn to work with the camera and within its limitations, you have to do this with any camera, digital or film, $300 or $2,200. Just my two cents worth, BTW my favorite is #3. I especially like the way you caught the sun rays through the clouds. If you had kept the detail in the ground it would have distracted from the image.