You asked for honest so I will be, but I'm afraid my comments will seem very harsh. I looked at your photos on smugmug as well.
My overall impression is that you picked a very poor time of day for these photos. Actually the quality of light looks quite promising but the direction is all wrong. The rich blue sky looks lovely but you have large areas of featureless black shadows in several of the pictures. In some it looks like there is perhaps a nice little element of interest (boat, for example) in the middle distance but it hardly stands out because it is in the shade and you seem to have underexposed in order to achieve your colour in the sky. In general the compositions are very centred, with the horizon dividing the middle of the image and the subject (if there is one) pretty much centred. I don't really find much to interest me in most of the photos and those with more promise are let down by the light.
Taking the shots in turn on smugmug....
1. Tree - Light is OK but I think you are cropped in rather tightly on the tree and there is the temptation of that lovely lake that is just out of reach. I'd like wider framing to show some more lake and put the tree in the left hand third of the picture, not dead centre. The woman on the bench in the background is a distraction.
2. Silhouette - Nice idea but there is simply too much featureless black. The amount of interest created by the horizon and tree in the foreground is pretty small. If I may, I'd like to share this example of a silhouette photo over water. Sure the blacks are black but there is, I feel, a bit more of interest in the silhouette shapes and the foreground and background too.
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3. "Framed" view over lake - For my tastes you have left far too much dense, dark, almost featureless framing from the foliage at the sides. Colour balance looks over-warm but maybe that is accurate. I seem to remember in the past I thought several of your photos were too warm. Have you calibrated your monitor yet? How are you setting white balance? I find little of interest in the scene that is lit, through the trees.
4. Bridge - The bridge over on the right looks like it might be an interesting feature but it is lost in the shadows and is very small in the frame. All we really have in the picture to draw the eye is a small sunlit patch on the far bank with nothing of real interest there.
5. Boat on right - The boat is very small and lost in the shadows, with just a small shaft of light to catch the eye. Is that your subject? The building on the left detracts from the scene. I think you would have done better to zoom (or crop) in tighter and lose the building completely and make the boat a stronger focal point. You still have the problem that it is disappearing into the shadows. I can't tell if it is moving towards you or away from you but there looks to be a lighter patch of water slightly nearer to you. Maybe shooting 30 seconds earlier or later would have placed the boat in the light and made it more visually significant (bigger and brighter).
6. View across the lake to tiny people - Again, details are so small as to be insignificant. Is there a subject here? I don't think that as a scene it is very interesting. There's really no foreground interest, except the top of a fence stump that was probably not intended to be in the frame. There is something in the water that might be interesting but I cannot tell what it is.
7. Building - This has a reasonably good balance of subject to setting but again you have an excess of featureless black in the frame. I'm all for naturally framing the scene but there is too much "nothing" on the left. I think you could have zoomed (cropped) in closer to lose the black and emphasise the building more. The light is not too bad here (except the black bit) but I do wonder how the building might have looked when bathed in glorious setting sun - but that kind of depends on which way it is facing.
8. Centred Boat - The boat is slap bang in the middle of the frame and heading towards a depressing shady area. The eye is drawn to the sunlit background, which is too distant to reveal detail or interest. What was your intended subject?
9. Distant building and chopped off boat - You've lifted the shadows on the left but now the sky seems blown out. Maybe some PP could fix it but I think a different time of day and different direction of light would serve you better. I'm not too sure about the chopped off boat. If you'd panned a few degrees to the right you would have all the boat and lost some of the left hand framing, which frankly is more than you need. I also don't know if my eyes need fixing but in this and the previous shot it looks like the verticals of the building are not quite vertical, but that could be an optical illusion. An overlaid grid would confirm one way or the other.
10. Peacock - This could be a stunning shot, but, sadly, it seems to be lacking detail on the bird and actually the colours do look a bit weird. Did you blow the blue channel in your exposure? Have you increased contrast and/or sharpening a little too much, or has smugmug destroyed your fine work? Maybe it's just the jpeg downsizing that simply can't hold the fine feather detail. It would be nice to see a larger version.
11. The best of the bunch, by far - Nice composition, lovely tone of light, subject and setting well balanced. Almost no distracting elements. A lovely scene. The icing on the cake would be to clone out the vehicles in the distance, and also their reflection.
Sorry for the harsh comments but you did ask for honest. Still, they're only *my* opinion so that doesn't really count for much
