Lola, I believe one of the most important steps you can take to grow as a photographer, is to ask others about their sincere opinions, so I'm delighted that you are doing just that. Seeing your own photos through other peoples eyes and to humbly absorb and contemplate their suggestions can be extremely helpful.
This is very different from simply putting your images on display, expecting everyone's unconditional praise, which sadly is the most common approach today.
I love that you have a goal for what you want to create, and the patience to wait for the desired shooting conditions. A lot of the time the only difference between a great photo and a mediocre one, is that the photographer had the patience to wait for the right conditions, be it light or smoke from a bushfire.
My favorite part of the photo are the bluish hills and the trees in the middle section. They look super and as a result the photo has a beautiful atmosphere, which I believe is what you wanted to create here.
I do think you could have gotten a little more out of the sky, so I want to see if I can help you to achieve that in the future. Sometimes it can be very hard to capture the whole dynamic range - from the bright sky and into the shadows - in a landscape and photographers were taking steps to achieve this even in the film days. This can become quite technical and include everything from old school gradient filters, dodging and burning, and to take multiple photos with different exposures to capture every detail in the sky and the shadows, and then combining them by hand or with automated HDR software.
My suggestion for you, is however as simple as playing around a little with manual exposure compensation as this is a great starting point. If your camera provides a histogram view of your images, it is ideal to check that the highlights and shadows of your photos aren't clipped. In this case only the highlights are clipped and a bit of negative exposure compensation could have revealed a little more detail in the skies, which would have made your picture even better in my opinion. It is very nice as is too, but we are here to learn from each other! If you don't know what a histogram is, you can see a good explanation here:
https://photographylife.com/un...
