Those shots are truly outstanding. Thanks for sharing.
Would you mind revealing some of the technicals? Aperture, ISO, shutter speed etc. You don't need to reveal secrets, i'd just like to know what you're thinking when you do it. Would love to get the odd shot like that (I know a lot is about time of day/light)
Sorry, only just spotted this question.
Rather than go through the specific settings for each shot I'll go through my usual routine instead.
First and foremost, almost every picture I take is from a tripod with a cable switch, no point buying fancy bits of glass for the front of your camera and then degrading the results with camera shake.
With camera stability sorted out I usually set the camera to aperture priority and set the optimum setting for sharpness as a standard. Depending on the lens that is usually f8 or f11.
Smaller apertures give more depth of field (apparent sharpness foreground to distance) but can also cause diffraction (a kind of scattering of light in the lens) which may erode that sharpness anyway. I have to have a pretty good reason to stop down beyond f16. Shutter speed is less important providing it's not windy so I leave that to the camera's meter.
Very occasionally I might open up, to throw something in the background out of focus but that's not really my style so it's rare.
Exposure wise I tend to fire off a test shot and them examine the camera's histogram. I shoot raw files for top quality so I'm looking for an exposure that stretches from the right hand edge of the histogram and doesn't clip at either end. I have my camera display set to flash to indicate highlight clipping, shadow clipping is slightly less worrisome.
A little bit of over or under exposure then optimises the exposure and allows the camera to increase or decrease the speed slightly if the light changes but still maintains the same bias.
Very occasionally I'll take one or two extra frames at different exposure times to recover lost detail if the contrast is very high.
When photographing moving water I often add a neutral density filter to increase the exposure time and create that swooshy water effect you see in a lot of my shots. I just like my water to seem fluid and not frozen in time.
