looked nice thew my viewfinder.

[LimePanda]

Just a thought, I believe your camera has a 95% viewfinder coverage.
Is it possible that things like the branches in your third photo weren't there when you lined up the shot and now they are detracting from it?
Since it says your photos are ok to edit I did a quick crop and then couldn't resist playing with the colors a bit and this is what I ended up with:
Disregard the colors as that was just me playing around but look at the crop.
What do you think?

 

[dannylightning]

I think your crop and colors are nice panda. I never even noticed those branches were there till you said something lol.

the main issue I have is the way the sun is shining down on the tree tops and what not, its kind of making things look kind of. overly bright in some areas i guess, not sure how else to explain it. if you notice in that last version I posted I was kind of able to get rid of that but it also made the trees look sort of dull now.

its not really the colors that were bothering me here. its the over all look of the picture because of what the sun is doing to it.

 

[KmH]

Those branches can be removed from the photo without having to resort to cropping the photo.
Unfortunately, LR is not the best for removing things from a photo. Photoshop CC is much better for that.
Which is why Adobe's Photography Program includes both Photoshop LR and Photoshop CC 2014.

 

[kdthomas]

On #8 do you think we could get the sky a bit darker blue? I loaded this in PS CC, added a selective color adjustment layer, chose blue and pulled the black slider up to 100% then chose Cyan and pulled the Black and Magenta sliders up to 100%

With your permission I'll post it back up, for whatever it's worth

 

[Derrel]

"They all look pretty good at closing time!"

Same goes for a lot of scenic/landscape photos. On a serious note, I think what makes or breaks most landscape shots is how fast the foreground drops off into mid-ground and background. If the focal length of the lens is fairly short, the background stuff is rendered so small in comparison to the foreground that many shots look "far away and boring". These do not suffer from that too much though, but the compositions seem to have too much top-space, and not enough foreground at the bottom, to "anchor" the scenes. I think both images desperately needed a full, good, close-up foreground section across the bottom, and a bit less emphasis on the sky area.

Another issue I've noticed is sometimes, the weather, and a fun day, and a wonderful day being alive and outdoors can elevate your mood, and you can literally SEE with your eyes how gorgeous things are, but then the camera lens gets into play, and the way the lens draws the scene is just not the way the human eye and brain can appreciate the scene, so the photos can be a let-down at times.