Ok, so I've read and reread all that everyone has written here and I genuinely thank everyone who has taken time to respond. All the comments have helped me.
-I know that gear isn't the problem. I have decent equipment. I wanted to stay gear neutral in my original post but I guess that didn't happen but I think it's natural that if the painting doesn't come out the way you had envisioned you should at least make sure there isn't anything obviously wrong with the brushes.....I threw it out there in case there was something obvious I was missing. I'm not so we can rule that out.
-Tripods - I have two, I honestly don't use them. I guess I put too much stock in the "IS-OIS-ETC and keep the shutter speed up" method and I need to start planting the camera on a tripod.
-If I going to continue with digital I need to up my skill level on the post processing side. I figured that with as easy as the digital world has made everything else in our lives, this shouldn't require this much work. False assumption/wishful thinking on my part. I stay true to what I said the original post that I wasn't looking for a magic bullet but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing something either.
-I will admit I'm frustrated. I've been "in to photography seriously" for about 15 years now and expected I would be more pleased with my work by now. I know the majority of pics we take are not that great but I still expected better. I guess I haven't made all of my 10,000 mistakes yet.
-Expectations - I think mine are too high, or I let them get too high too often. I can tend towards perfectionism, usually to my determent, as I think has happened here.
-I've gone through my archive looking at most of my images this morning, with the new glasses of all your suggestions and looking for examples to post and looking in the light of "show me your images that aren't good" a lot of them turned out to be not that bad, on screen anyway (see above about expectations), however the prints still don't grab me but that's another story.
-I also picked out a group that were favorites and made prints of them as well (I've got this behemoth on my desk I might as well use it) and all the images I'm proudest of and whose prints please me ,with only a few exceptions, were MF film scanned by a lab. Those were the only prints who's sharpness, tone, and noise were as I envisioned them to be. I think it's interesting to note too that these were also taken handheld and not in the best of lighting conditions.
-On my example picture of what I like - I like all of them and didn't how similar they are till many of you pointed it out. From this I take my best course of action is to move to the UK where the lighting is more pleasing to me 😀😀 This was a very valuable lesson though to me about my personal aesthetics, I honestly wouldn't have said those images were similar. I need to look less and see more.
-In all this trial printing of things I also learned that smaller prints hide my problems...although I don't print bigger than 8.5x11 or 8x8 (I'm a square junkie) a 5x5 print of a questionable looking 8x8 can look very different.
-Baring your soul on a forum full of like minded people can be very enlightening and helpful. I honestly feel better about the whole thing than when I posted my original post.
Thank you,
Jim
