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First of all your pictures fascinate! Honestly I'm not good at photographing, tell me please is it possible only by very expensive camera, to make such photos?
The best tip I suggest you follow is DON'T use your smartphone. Use a real camera.
Anywhere on the Oregon coast. That can be a fairly reasonable cost photography vacation. There are nice inexpensive motels and some of the prettiest campgrounds in the entire USA. There are excellent restaurants in all price ranges, some of them very reasonable for outstanding food.
Take your choice of the National Parks in the USA. All of them have excellent photo opportunities.
Go over to the Oregon forum and then the Bend sub-forum and at the very top is a sticky with photos of Central Oregon. Take a look at those. They don't even scratch the surface for lovely place to photograph. Bend is an outdoor activity area, so in addition to photography, you could camp, hike, fish, river raft, golf, rock climb, dog sled in the winter, ski, snowmobile, and on and on. There are also festivals of all sorts all year round.
Sisters, in Central Oregon has a western frontier town theme, an elk farm, lovely mountain views, and once a year there is a quilt festival that bring the very best of the quilters literally from all over the world. Sisters is also full of wonderful art galleries (not that you could photograph inside those, but they are fun to browse) and the gift shops are full of arts and crafts, not ticky tacky Chinese junk.
When I was in Pennsylvania, I got a good collection of photos of old barns. I love old barns.
All the latest and greatest gear is not going to help unless one learns how to compose a good shot (to say it more artistically, how to use light). A mediocre composition using the latest camera and lens is still going to be a mediocre picture (I think it was Ansel Adams who said, "There's nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept"). There are many books (and online tutorials) on this. One of my favourites that I've found to be very clear, is Michael Freeman's The Photographer's Eye.
Or, image stabilization lenses and a cam that hooks up to it...
Add in wider field of view lenses, a little practice, and one can get away with some seriously slow shutter speeds.
Tripods are good, but often a PIA to carry outside/set up and not feel planted. Leaning on something and pretending you are trying to pick off a bad guy at 200 yards works well, also.
RAW is fine, but many pic shooters here won't know what to do with it, won't have the processing software to achieve the end results, etc.
Jpegs ain't bad, if shot and/or processed well, in my experience.
What fuzz suggested: The Photographer's Eye. Exc book and refresher, even for us geezers that have been shooting since we got our first view camera.
GL, mD
Or buy glass that can handle low light--f/2.8 works wonders without the need for a tripod--or shooting RAW.
Fast glass is great for a narrow depth of field, but it will still give better contrast and sharpness if you stop down to f11.
You can shoot hand held with almost any modern sensor at ISO3200, at the expense of digital noise. Shooting at slower speeds suppresses the noise level. ISO100 or even 25 if your camera will go that low will give better results, but requires a tripod. That's no reason to miss a shot you can't get any other way, so if conditions require it, feel free to open the aperture wide open and crank up the sensor. A tripod will still help. I keep a tiny one in my camera bag, so am never without a steady rest. A flash sometimes helps too.
One of the drawbacks of digital sensors is that, like the old slide films, they are very contrasty. The advantage of shooting raw mode is that none of the information collected by the sensor is discarded. It is all available for your image software to work with. Yes, it's quicker to just let the camera convert the image to a jpg, and for snapshots that is the way to go. Under more challenging circumstances, shooting raw will let you capture a truly high quality image at the expense of quite a bit of time at the computer tweaking the image. It's the modern version of spending hours in a darkroom to produce a really great print, but is even more powerful.
Nosy Traveller, you can find a "beautiful spot to photograph" ANYwhere if you look just right, and depending on your "composition" desire.
The most beautiful pic{s} I ever took was from climbing atop Diamond Head volcano of Waikiki/ Honolulu "from above". With a disposable "throw away" 35 MM camera. On a nearly clear day. TAken for pelasure, beautifull by accident. If cities are your "thing".
{I'd post it here, but just re-installed the OS as the old was corrupted so could not save anything. I have yet to re-load the {uncorrupted} CD of that trip. Maybe later, if I remember.}
This Google street view does not do the scene justice but this is on California Hwy 78/79 about 1.5 miles south of Santa Ysabel (towards Julian) and was part of my daily commute for 6 years. It is truly stunning in person.
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