Hi Ronnie - welcome to TP.
OK, rather than crit all the images (there's quite a lot - better to post just a couple for detailed critique, if that's what's wanted) I'll try to help generally.
I couldn't quite seem to get far enough back while taking that one above, so I had the camera at an angle pointing upwards which has ended up in the sides of the castle looking squint. How should I have gotten round this?
You've used a wide angle lens in a confined space with the lens pointing upwards to get the building in, and have framed it fairly tightly causing the building to be distorted like it's falling backwards. This happens because the top of the building is relatively much further away from you than the bottom, and therefore appears much smaller in the photograph. There are several ways to deal with this, none of which may have been available to you. If you had been able to take a much wider image with more space around the building then you might have been able to correct this in software when editing the photo - not a good solution, but works as a last resort. A better - very expensive - solution is to use a lens that can move the front of the lens in relation to the sensor, making the top of the building bigger on the sensor and the bottom smaller relatively. Probably the best solution of all - not available in a tight space, is to move further away and use a longer focal length to reduce the relative difference in height between the top and bottom of the building, reducing the distortion effects.
Most of your images appear to have been taken using a wide angle lens up close rather than a longer focal length from a distance, causing distortion - notice how the head and legs of the statue lean away from the viewer compared to the torso? To prevent that, try to use a focal length of 35mm+ (i.e. near the longer end of your zoom) when getting close to things unless you WANT that distortion effect.
When taking this one, the foreground seems dark and the background nice and light. Do you like this or is there a simple way around it? I was standing in the dark and the sunshine up ahead.
Our eyes automatically respond to light and dark, compensating so quickly that you may not even be aware of it. The result is that shadows that don't seem dark and highlights that don't
seem bright to our eyes can actually cover a very extreme range of intensity, much wider than a camera sensor can cope with. Here your camera has exposed for the bright section of the images, leaving the foreground dark. There are ways of compensating when the photograph was taken - using gradient filters for example - but that's slow and impractical if you're just walking round snapping. Software could develop the image further to compensate a little for the shadows and control the highlights. You might also find your camera has settings that will give a higher dynamic range, allowing for greater extremes of light and dark in an image before highlights burn out or shadows block up.
Are you processing your pictures once you take them from the camera, or are these straight out of camera (SOOC)?
One more general hint: try to allow a little more space around your subjects in general - room to 'breathe'. It's very tempting to get right in tight, with the subject filling the frame, as big as possible. Often it can work against the image, making it feel cramped and not providing enough context for the subject to sit comfortably in the picture.
HTH.
