For those of you that were wondering, the camera I used to take my photos was a Kodak P880. Its in their performance line.
I took about 175 photos to pick out those as the best, and then played around in an old version of Paint Shop Pro (version 7, which is like 4 yrs old now) to do the modifications. It will take me a long time to get used to "what works" with the camera in getting nice shots, and what doesnt - and also I couldnt tell you all the steps I did with the colors to get the final digitized products. But here are a few examples of what the ORIGINALS looked like before I played around.
BEFORE AND AFTER
The ones I didn’t modify with color, etc. are not listed on this post.