I completely overlooked the dog pictures. I think they were posted while I was still constructing my reply in post #10.
In the dog pictures your EXIF is....
- 70mm, 1/160, f/8, 200 ISO, flash on
- 60mm, 1/80, f/8, 200 ISO, flash off
The first dog picture looks fairly sharp at the mouth end but the DOF is far too thin to include the whole dog. The picture looks pretty close to what I might expect. Perhaps the shutter speed is a smidge slow and camera shake or shutter button jerk is a possibility, but it is far from bad.
The second dog picture is pretty hopeless, I'm afraid. It is overexposed, shutter speed is definitley too slow, your DOF is minimal and I'm not even sure where the focus point ended up - perhaps nearer the nose than the eyes.
Plug some suitable numbers into the DOF calculator here -
http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html - and you will be able to judge how much DOF you have for your settings and subject distance. I'd guess for that second shot you were about 60cm from the dog, which would give a DOF of under 3cm. If focus was on the tip of the dog's nose then half that would have been in front of the dog and the only thing in focus would be the nose (not the snout) itself. Combining minimal DOF with the potential for camera shake and subject blur = nothing sharp. Looking at the burnt out highlights on the top of the head and the nose it looks like the dog is backlit and basically you are shooting a black dog in shaded light. You need to think about where the light is coming from, and supply some of your own if need be, by using fill flash for example, and you also need to get that shutter speed up. More light would help for sure, bt you could also increase your ISO. 200 ISO is not the only game in town.
Looking at the cityscape, even in the whole picture it looks like the atmosphere is quite hazy. City = smog. Hot day = haze. Over water = moisture/humidity/mist. Combine those things when shooting from a bit of a distance and suddenly the atmosphere is not as clean and pure as you might wish. Certainly the picture looks a little soft but the bigger handicap comes from lack of contrast. The EXIF says you shot this at 06:34, which actually ought to rule out heat, I think, and also smog, but perhaps not morning mist. But was this really shot at 06:34 or is this a time zone thing, with the camera's time not having been altered? If a "dirty" atmosphere was the problem then there is not much you can do except pick a better time of day for cleaner air. Otherwise you can probably tweak things with some PP. I can't see anything here that looks obviously like a problem with the kit or the operation of the camera.
Here's a tweaked example of the cityscape. It's a little OTT but just to show what can be done. Results would be better with the original file to work with....
By the way, the perception of sharpness comes from areas of high contrast where edge boundaries meet. When you adjust sharpening amounts in your editing software it adjusts the degree of contrast where edges meet. In simple terms, if a photograph lacks contrast overall it will probably not look sharp. Your image definitely lacked contrast, perhaps due to atmosphere, or maybe a filter. If you have a UV filter fitted for protection then I recommend you consider removing it and only use a lens hood for protection unless you are in an environment of flying detritus/debris. A hood should be used at all times, always, no exceptions, except when using a CPL filter or ND Grad and needing to access the filter for adjustments.
EDIT : BTW, whenever you downsize an image, the last step before saving should be a final round of sharpening. This is important because the very act of downsizing the image squeezes the detail out of it and what might have been sharp edges beforehand can easily lose the contrast that gave them that sharp appearance. I use Lightroom for my editing and it has an option to apply output sharpening to a file when it is exported/converted from Lightroom. This small step can separate "good" from "wow". There is a sharpening tutorial here -
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=466333. If you want your image to compete with the best on the web you do need to master the art of sharpening, along with many other things (lighting, composition, timing, exposure, creative DOF, creative motion control, good shooting technique and all the other PP tricks apart from sharpening). Relying on what the camera spurts out is not going to cut it. Shooting raw will give you more flexibility to perfect your images. Shooting JPEG does tend to limit your freedom to fine tune.
Again i will be using kit lenses.
