Good clear well exposed shot, Brian.
The rearmost parts are getting soft but in this particular case I don't think that is a problem because it tends to give something of a perspective effect. The front parts are well focused and that is what matters.
I do indeed like it for some shots.In this case it was sunny and the only way to capture the beauty of the center was to seriously underexpose the rest of the shot. The green and the blue were clipped on the dark side but the histogram was well built but built to the left.
And the center has minimal green and blue and looks pretty good the way it was exposed?
Carefully said, remember your colour theory - the complement of green is magenta and the complement of blue is yellow, so both of these channels show problems, when I open the file you have posted. Have a look in C1 to see what is happening on those individual channels. From what I can tell you still have a bit of headroom before you clip on the other side of the histogram, but I am looking at your posted images, not the original raw data, so you have more information to look at than I do.
At ISO 100, you should have plenty of dynamic range. Have you tried exposure bracketing? Having a series of shots that are 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop apart should give you a fairly clean image with minimal clipping. It could be that the your hit close to the limits of the sensor, but when I see the amount shown in my screen shot, something is likely not quite right with your exposure.
Medusa.
Good detail in the snakes ...
Just got back in from the garden. The a68 comes with many exposure bracketing options. Too many to try all at once. But I like the ones I did try. I get an in camera balanced histogram. By balanced i mean all the colored lines more or less track the same line. It is on the left half but that's where I like to be anyway.
My colors are certainly richer. Let me know what you think when i post the shot please and thank-you.