Think the detail on the spider shots are excellent not sure about the berries but think you may get the same effect with a flash however for non reflective items I think that the ring flash may well produce some wonderful results. As this was a trial having just unpacked the new equipment I think it unfair to compare it to the previous results by this photographer, lets wait till he is able to use it to it's full advantage.

Thank you for sharing your shots with us and I hope you enjoyed your holidays, I guess that as you have placed your work on here you are hoping for comment and as I have not found the ‘nice one’ type comments very helpful I have tried to write the way I felt when viewing.

1/ like the colour very much and indeed the composition but the choice of lens may be a little too wide for the shot, IMO it would be better if the buildings either side were not falling out of shot.
2/ does not work for me the figure seems to dominate and is not that interesting would like to see the view she is looking at. Perhaps a narrower f setting would have given a nice shot with a strong foreground figure and a beautiful scene below.
3/ think perhaps a bit of cropping would help here. It may have been better to take the shot from a lower angle to get the whole of the wall painting in and to allow a little more space on the left. The whole shot would IMO be improved if it were a bit more defined and the colour was stronger to counteract the large amount of off white.
4/ like this one and love the blue colour of the tables, would not remove the figure but if you do decide to then to crop would probably be best.
5/ competent shot of a firework think it may be improved by cropping some from the left and a tiny part from the right so your eyes are concentrated on the firework and not the shore line.

Hope you do not think I am too harsh as I enjoyed your images and only wish to make suggestions you may find of help.

Have just popped it into PS and changed the light from normal to soft, used curves to pick out the darks and the lightest and then used the shadow and highlight control at the full 50% and you would be surprised how different it now looks, go on, have a go.

Thing is Davex if you, or in this case your wife, like it the opinion of others is of no importance. In this case it may be the memories in your wife's head that she is seeing and not the image you were able to take. If you do go to the expense of having a print done I hope she likes it and does not suddenly see what the rest of us have. Sure it is nothing to do with your skills and more to do with the opportunity you had to capture this, may be a session in Photoshop would help remove some of the blue and increase the definition.

Sorry Davex I see you ask for a CC and my grasp of the technical is not good but my impression is that it is boring there is nothing to catch the eye and hold your attention. The blue sky goes into blue mountains and they merge into darker blue trees, now an orange balloon to one side of the shot may have made a big difference but I don't suppose you could arrange that so may be a different view point would have helped.

Like the composition of this shot but am confused by the comment above that it is too fast as the trees and leaves are out of focus, can you explain please, the f stop was 11 so may be increasing that would have given a wider area of focus but I do not understand the suggestion that it was too fast unless that is what you meant that the stop would be better set at 22 rather than the shutter speed being set to a faster setting.

Mike, it looks quite different and I like them both.

If you start breaking the kit up I may be interested in the flash.

I'm sure you are right, dlacouture,
I have a lot to learn.

Thank you Bob, I used to have a square monitor that I liked and was great for viewing images, could only replace it with a wide one and I am not impressed. Think next time I will try for something better and deeper if that is possible as I feel I am not always getting the best of my image viewing.