I've been really struggling with the right value range for my landscape stuff. The compositional images with simplified shapes don't really require a delicate balance with the inner pos/neg process, but the landscape stuff really expects the negs to be on their game. I'm getting closer!
This is hardly in poor taste. Some of the most artistically conservative people I have met have been art teachers. Then again, some of the most artistically uninhibited people I have met were other art teachers.