Well. The guys like Peter Lik and Marc Adamus are making pictures to sell. Popped colors in one or two palettes (often blue/purple matched with orange/yellow) are what sells. Popped to catch the eye, narrow palettes to fit in with your Decorating Scheme at home. They haven't got a concept other than "pretty! bright! marketable!" and that's almost certainly on purpose.
Ultimately all photography is conceptual. If you can shoot it, I can duplicate it. Sometimes, I admit, only with heroic effort, and I'm never going to get the clouds literally the same. But the thing you bring as a photographer is not, ultimately, an image, but an idea. The commercial landscape guys have a concept, but it's pretty thin: colorful! sells well!
I like your photos, generally, but I'm not seeing any real consistency. You're pretty clearly looking for individual shots that are "good", whatever that means to you, not trying to create a coherent body of work.
My approach to everything, these days, is entirely conceptual, but perhaps not in the negative way you mean. If I were to shoot landscapes, which I don't, I would look at the landscape and try to imagine what it means to me, or how it could be re-imagined to mean something else. I might envision it in a literal way as a deadly arid desert, or a fecund rain forest teeming with life. I might imagine it as a post-apocalyptic hellscape. Then, from that concept, I work toward some pictures that try to encapsulate, to present, to show variations on, that idea.
The result doesn't have to be weird looking, the result could appear at first glance as purely a set of good representational landscapes. They might also be blurry black and white messes, depending on what approach I take. The whole collection, as a whole, should clarify the underlying idea, though.
Ideally. It always works *for* *me* but perhaps not for one other soul on earth.
