Compare the detail in this same to the standard ACR 3.4 version of the Alpha 100 Moroccan village shot. This is a picture I took in February of the view of Branxton from the Flodden Field memorial, and just happens to contain houses, trees and fields (but rather a lot of sky) and frontal flat sunshine much the same as the A100 pic. It is also reasonably comparable in settings - minus 2/3rds exposure on the camera (this is an 'no auto, all zero' Camera Raw conversion using the Medium Contrast tone curve and camera WB), 55mm on the high grade 17-55mm f2.8 zoom stopped well down to f7.1, with a reasonably steady 1/180th hand-held shutter speed. Despite the -2/3rds setting and the big area of sky, the Nikon metering has chosen to be very generous with this scene.