Originally posted by Oricman Yes I've used them side by side which is how I can see the K30 isn't working for me.
If you used a K-30 and a 1/2.3" point-and-shoot camera side by side, then you would see that the K-30 is much better.
A 1/2.3" point-and-shoot camera comes nowhere close to the K-30 in DR.
If you would put a typical Caucasian person in the foreground of the picture you just showed us, you could never get his/her features to show and get the landscape detail to show in the same picture, because of how Caucasian skin "glows" under sun light. Most 1/2.3" point-and-shoot cameras produce 8-bit JPEG images only, so you don't even have the option of going back to your computer and fixing things, because the detail is lost forever. I notice from the EXIF, that you had an exposure compensation of 0.70; you could adjust that to get the images lighter if you wanted that, but at some point you would lose the nice-looking clouds; as
D1N0 commented, a better solution would be to adjust levels in PP to lighten the earth while keeping the nice sky {getting both Straight-Out-Of-Camera is asking too much of any camera, and I really doubt if the limited DR of a 1/2.3" sensor would do it for you; more likely it would turn the sheep and the clouds into white blobs}
The image you showed here was taken with an f-stop of f/7.1. At that kind of f-stop I don't know how you could have much of anything out-of-focus, because a DOF calculator shows that a focal length of 17mm {taken from your EXIF} and f-stop of 7.1, means that if you had focused at 7', everything beyond 3.5' would be in focus; in fact, as I have already commented here, two weeks ago, when we were touring Quebec, I discovered that my K-30 was in MF mode, but looking through my pictures later, I could not determine when that happened because all of my pictures were sharp, demonstrating again that it is really really difficult to get out-of-focus pictures when you are using a smallish aperture.