to be honest, your best bet is to go and do some learning about cameras and their manual settings.
theres loads of different combinations of settings that work in loads of different cases (capturing a picture of landscape vs something moving, dusk vs midday, near to the subject vs far away etc)
for general landscape like what ive seen you put up so far (that second photo is very nice btw)
1) Watch the framing/composition - if you dont have something interesting to look at, lighting it right wont really make much of a difference
2) Manual settings are *probably* the best to use as long as you have an idea what each of the different settings do (if your starting out, just worry about ISO, aperture and shutter speed for the moment, theres plenty more on a deeper level but 9 times out of 10, just those 3 are enough)
3) From my experience, if you have a choice between making the photo too dark in the shadows and making the photo too bright in the highlights, make it too bright in the highlights - make it too bright in the highlights. For whatever reason, the files retain highlight information much better than shadow information, so youll be able to bring them back more without loosing quality in post processing.
4) Try get out in the morning or evening when the sun is lower in the sky, you can get better photos more easily as the lighting makes everything look nicer (generally)
5) Following up on that last point, dont be afraid to play with shadows, they can hide parts of the photo which would otherwise look ugly or indeed they can give otherwise flat looking subjects depth.
and otherwise just keep playing around with it. once you get comfortable with some of that stuff you can mess around with picture profiles etc, but generally i dont think you need them too much to get a good photo from the
inspire 2's camera!