All the lighting is natural, those shots were shot around 3:00 pm outside sunny as a whistle. the first photo was in the shade, and the other to in full sunlight. I don't use a flash due to the lack of one (working on getting one of those :-) exposure comp./AEB - "0" , picture style - "Landscape" White balance - "sunny" Metering mode - "evaluative metering" and of course I only ever shoot on manual. I don't use photoshop for post processing, do to the lack of work flow that already exists in light room. The only time I use photoshop for post photo processing, is if I have to literally erase people. As far as post processing goes, I usually bump up my blacks slider value +1, or 2 then correct the exposure as needed. Depending on the image I might bump up the overall contrast slider +1-3. I try to stay away from it though cause it ruins detail. And the seconded image I just desaturated the image too almost complete black and white, and then just raised the overall temperature of the image +5 towards warm/yellow Other than that I don't mess with a whole lot. Oh and I also have a UV filter on all of my lenses, made my colors pop out a lot more. Hope that helps! oh and I almost for got. You all are going to shoot me, but I pretty much only ever shoot in j-peg mode. Tried RAW for a month or so, and got super tired of the extra time converting over to j-peg. And not to mention taking up 3 times as much space. I also tend to like the colors that j-peg produces over raw. I know that sounds silly, but I feel like i get more of a contrasty/darker color saturation with j-peg. It more or less reminds me of the film shots I took back in the day on my dads old Minolta XD11. And the difference that i got from shooting raw, converting, post processing, then output to j-peg. I didn't notice enough difference to care.