How did you become better at photography?
Experience. You need to know what you can do with the camera, how to do it. As well as how you can edit the photo afterwards. It's hard though, because most of the time your camera is just sitting on a shelf. I think every trip has a re-learning curve.
The big issue I have with my Africa pictures is that I didn't shoot in RAW. A dumb mistake that seems obvious to me now, but I didn't know. I didn't have a teacher. I didn't really research. I was used to shooting on compacts that didn't have RAW. I got a better camera for that trip but I didn't have that experience of knowing the difference. I had never edited a raw photo before. Once I had, holy crap was I wrong to not be shooting in raw.
Now I can look at photos and just know how much better I could adjust them in Lightroom if they were shot in raw. Knowing how you can use Lightroom also frees you up a lot.
I was always good with composition but you also get better over time. It's also amusing to see how bad people are with it. Asking people to take pictures of you in front of something and they can't balance foreground and background. It's all the background and a tiny head of you in a corner. Or it's just you where you could be anywhere.
I need to get better at aperture for close up wildlife shots. Earlier this year at the Melbourne Zoo and a wildlife park in Port Douglas I was shooting with this in mind. I am just taking lots of shots at different settings. Hopefully, this can become more instinctual. Taking lots of shots always gives you room to find something good.
I think liking taking photos is important. I don't often do it, but I may go and take photos, even if I never look at them after. During one of the lockdowns last year I wandered around down the Mornington Peninsula taking pictures of birds and bees just for the fun of it. Never looked at the pictures.
I don't think landscape and scenery shots are hard to get wrong if you have an eye for composition. Wildlife if what I love but that is harder.
It's just progress though. My Galopogas shots of wildlife are better than my African ones by what I learned from the experience. My Antarctica shots are better again. They're great, to be honest. I often see professional ones and think, "did they steal my photo?"
Although I did research for that trip. Online guides are great, I think you can naturally get to a point where you need to look to guides to get better. I may have come back with a lot of overexposed snow and ice if I didn't read up on photographing in that scenery. Something which now seems to me to be obvious, but I had never shot in snow before. Things which become simple knowledge aren't always obvious because it's just a hobby.
Online guides and youtube channels are great. Just keep them. There are some great guides I've used in the past I can not find again.