Pictures looks like a painting

Looks like overly aggressive noise reduction coupled with overly aggressive sharpening. It has that "smeared" look in some areas, and the noise in the water looks like it has been sharpened, causing artifacts.

What kind of camera was this shot with?

Early Nikon DSLRs had this issue (but that was years and years ago so I assume its been corrected).

As another poster mentioned its getting overprocessed somewhere.

I would get rid of both and do it in post processing using Photoshop or Lightroom. Does your camera give you an option to shoot in RAW mode?

I could be wrong but I *believe* its noise reduction that causes that effect. I forget which one specifically though.

I agree with chrono1081 - do as little noise reduction and sharpening in camera to allow you to use better processing in external editors. This camera can shoot in RAW, so I'd do that as well. It will give you much more latitude in post-processing. Once you "bake in" the adjustments into a jpeg in the camera, they are much more difficult to modify after the fact. At first your workflow will slow down as it appears that you are doing more post-processing per image, but once you've done this a bit you will get much faster.

Another option, if your camera allows it, is to shoot RAW+JPEG. That way you have 2 versions of your image. You can use your JPEG SOOC when you really nail everything, and then for those difficult images you can fall back on the RAW image and coax more quality out of it.

RE: Pictures looks like a painting

This is a result of improper sharpening of the image, to remove this first of all enhance photo by automatic color and contrast enhancement, then clarify it. In the end use unsharp mask after saturation enhancement. By this you will get rid of noise reduction as well.