[masraum]

Well, I bet that the Pro's photos looked like yours and he tweaked them in photoshop. (levels, curves, saturation) You could probably do that with yours, but it can be time consuming, especially at the beginning. I think the "pro" that took those used a bunch of post-processing (PS) because the colors and lighting look unnatural to me. I suspect that if you lightened your photos a bit and cranked up the saturation, that they'd look as good or better than the pro's.

I'm not pro, but these are my ideas.

One of the tools is a wide angle lens (assuming you have an APC sized sensor, probably down to the 10mm or 12mm range) that has a very wide aperture (really small f/# number). The more light you can let in the better. At the beginning, you may want to bracket your photos. Take the photo that the camera says you should take, and then add exposure compensation to 2 subsequent photos to slightly over and under expose what the camera thought was the best setting. After time, you would probably get to know what you needed to adjust the camera to get the best shots.