Why

Ok, so I've tried my best do discuss how to not make a crappy image. But then it has been pointed out that these advices only work if you know what is that you're going to shoot. Which is not always the case. So now I'll try to share some ideas on how I pick the subject to take picture of.

Disclaimer: the whole contents of this page is my personal opinion.

Well, you have to take good pictures and avoid taking bad ones. But what makes a picture a good one?

I think there are 2 separate metrics, not really connected: how much the image is interesting and how aesthetically pleasing it is.

I also think it is easier to discuss how to make an image good form an aesthetic point of view. Apart from being able to find images with traffic lights, we, humans have other things in common and visual taste is one of them. Of course, there are some overly unique snowflakes, who will claim to like something completely different, but who caresI'm talking about the majority here. So, what are those things?

Nature

We are animals and nature is our habitat: it makes us happy when the sun is shining, flowers are blooming, bunnies are... well, just are, and so on.

Therefore, nature & wildlife pictures mostly always look good. Just get yourself a telephoto lens and go find some cute animals:

Places with a view are as well safe bet: we like such places since prehistoric times, even paleontologists tend to search for prehistoric habitats in places with a view

Architecture

Another common thing to shoot is some architectural landmarks. It is easier than shooting bunnies as buildings tend to stay in place, and to be built in a way that makes it easy to look at them and take pictures. But it is actually a problem.

Consider this one:

This is a Parliament building in Budapest. This picture is rather old, taken in 2015. I think it's ok in terms of aesthetics: the building is beautiful, it has this nice lighting etc. I only had to not f*ck it up too much, which I hope I did not. Now, let's use a search engine to look for other pictures of that place:

Have you noticed it? No? I've inserted the picture above into this one and it looks as if it was there (well, I hope so at least). Which means that this is not an interesting picture - everyone can get the same one, most likely yours won't be the best from a technical point of view.

You can always say something like: "There are many like it, but this one is mine". And it might be fine, but unless you can afford traveling really often, you will soon run out of landmarks in your city.

Therefore, we need to take more interesting pictures.

How?

So, as we now agree (right?), architecture itself is not exactly interesting.

Nature photos, even if you're infinitely far from NatGeo photographers, are better in this regard, especially for city-dwellers. But how can we improve it?

Lighting

Technically, we're not taking pictures of objects. We capture some light that has been reflected by them, sometimes we capture just the light itself - think of shooting stars or auroras or a rainbow.

Therefore, to make a picture more interesting, you may try to have somewhat interesting lighting. The most obvious idea would be to take pictures of a sunset (or sunrise, but it's just too hard).

These images would be way less interesting if not the sunset that colors the sky and clouds in this nice yellow.

Worth mentioning that now your subject is the sunset itself, so it should affect the composition (in other words - more sky, less everything else)

But what if you want to make a day picture better?

Well, lights to the rescue! It might be a good idea to let the sunlight in your lens. It really helps during the winter, when there's not enough colors.

Here I've pointed my camera pretty much directly to the low winter sun and then made a picture a bit warmer in post-production. As a result - this is no longer a picture of the forest, but a picture of light making it's way through the trees.

Not only sunset

There are other lighting events that may help in creating a more interesting picture. The most common one is the fog. It does not only reduce the visibility, it affects artificial lights making them softer.

Back to architectural example. This picture would be completely uninteresting in good weather conditions, but the fog makes it unique - a lot of people can take a picture of this same place, but you had to be there in the correct time to see it all covered with the fog.

Unlike the Hungarian Parliament picture, this one at least tries to be an interesting one, though this building is not a landmark.

Even more extreme example - this is literally a picture of light rays in the fog. I think this picture gets pretty low aesthetic score, but should be considered somewhat interesting.

People & streetphoto

This is a way trickier one. There are pretty much 2 ways of photographing people - either staged or not. And I don't even know what's harder. For the 1st one you might need special equipment: either lights or flashes, or lots of luck.

This picture was taken without any special light sources, but conditions were really good otherwise - a lot of sunlight and a white wall without anything reflecting on it.

You don't want to shoot portraits with too wide lens to avoid distortions, so unless you have a studio (and if you do, why the hell are you even reading this?) or a huge room, you're bound to only portraits. Which is really limiting and you may run out of ideas pretty soon.

So, you might switch to shooting people in their somewhat natural habitat, cities. I truly admire those who can just go out and point their camera on some random folks, and I'm not one of them.

This is my best attempt at streetphoto so far.

Please remember to check your local regulations regarding photographing random people (especially minors) and then uploading those pictures!

If you're uncomfortable with the sreetphoto like me, you may try to shoot silhouettes of people. It doesn't tell a story (which a streetphoto is supposed to do), but it depicts people without showing their faces.

Conclusion

So, the picture should score some points of being interesting and being aesthetic. If it is only good in one of these two things - there's a room for improvement.