focus - Why are my photos taken at f/11 less sharp than those taken at a wider aperture?

I am new to photography. I have Fujifilm FinePix HS10 camera. Lately I was trying my hands on landscape photography.

I learnt from different tutorials that setting high aperture value gets most of the scene in focus. Hence proceeding with this notion I set my aperture value to f-11 which is the highest on my camera.

But what I observed is that, f-11 images were very soft and I don't see that background elements well focused.

On the contrary, images taken in range f-4 to f-5.6 were better looking in terms of sharpness of background elements. I have attached sample images for your reference.

Can you please shed some light on this?

Image taken with f-4

Image taken with f-11

Answer

Images with your camera will start showing signs of diffraction around f/4 to f/5.6 due to the size of the sensor. Shooting at a significantly smaller aperture (like f/11) will only increase the diffraction problems. You'll lose resolution.

Here's a good tutorial on diffraction:

http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/diffraction-photography.htm