If I could tell you only one thing about improving your photography, it would be this:
Just shoot the scene in front of you.
Sometimes I make time to just walk around with a camera. No agenda, no plan. When I do, I try to shoot everything I see that catches my eye. After I delete the blurry images, I typically mark any "good" ones but never delete the others. Why? Because you just never know when an image will suddenly gain in personal or historical meaning.
Take this image of Funtown Pier in Seaside Park. I took this in December of 2010. I was using my used Canon 5D (no Mark, the original). I had traveled down to NJ to spend a few days with my aging parents. I took a few hours to get some air, process how they were getting older, and get a few shots. The light was not perfect, and it was undoubtedly chilly down the shore, but I wasn't there for a portfolio image; I just wanted to do what I love in a place that I grew up. Some of my earliest memories were of my mom taking me to the boardwalk with a thermos full of hot water and a hot dog floating in it (don't judge).
Funtown Pier in Seaside Park New Jersey
Maybe that's why I choose Seaside, perhaps I just wanted to smell the sea air, I can't say. I spent an hour or two walking the boards, thinking about all the time, quarters, and dimes I spent in the arcades and playing the games of chance. If I had known how quickly it would all evaporate, I would have spent a lot longer and taken way more images.
Fast forward to Superstorm Sandy and the damage that did. As if the storm wasn't bad enough, the electrical systems became corroded from the saltwater floods, and several months later, what was left of the boardwalk would go up in flames. It was all gone.
Suddenly every image I took that cold day in December had new meaning. I could have easily looked at my pictures being critical of the lighting, the resolution of my then aging first-generation camera. I also could have deleted them on composition when I culled the obviously unusable ones. Not because they were terrible, they just didn't have meaning from my perspective at the time. My focus back then was more on the Microstock side. I would shoot hundreds of commercial, non-editorial images a week. The boardwalk, like my parents, were there my whole life; why would I think there was an urgency to document? To linger, enjoy just being in the moment? Eleven years, more wrinkles, and living through massive changes, both good and bad, reveal the answer to that question.
I am delighted I saved those images. They now have personal meaning to me because what I captured is gone. They also help preserve a bit of Jersey Shore history that has been consigned to oblivion.
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