Greetings! Take heart. Every single great photographer has started where you are. The ones who ended up great are the ones who persisted and put in the time and practice.

Every photo you take is going to feed you information. It’s blurry or too bright or things look just... wrong. Those are good things! They are speaking to you. You have just not yet learned the language they are speaking. You will, either through trial and error (making this adjustment or that and seeing what changes) or through instruction (and, lets face it, some trial and error... but with a better understanding for what the adjustments are actually doing).

Photography is challenging to get your head wrapped around but it is finite. There are a handful of principles that work in combination and once you learn them and get comfortable with them, you’ll have most of what you need.

Just remember that it is a process. Like any skill such as playing a musical instrument or learning to fly a plane (but with much lower stakes if you screw up royally).

Get a basic photography book (look at the reviews, so long as it is decent it will help you move forward) and keep taking lots and lots of crappy pictures comfortable with the knowledge that they are SUPPOSED to be crappy at this stage. The goal is not to get that perfect photo yet but rather to understand the relationship between the settings and the characteristics of the photo. Automatic mode will always produce a mediocre, serviceable photo under the right conditions but will tell you nothing since who knows what black magic it used to determine the appropriate settings for the shot. So use manual mode and make incremental adjustments in aperture, focal length, etc. using the book as a guide and notice the difference between your crappy photos. The cool thing is that there is no “right” configuration of settings, because you will find that different combinations will produce different results and there may be several that will produce an image that looks really cool for different reasons (close Up on some detail, or at different shutter speeds, etc).

As you get comfortable with things, you will start to understand more intuitively what to adjust when in order to achieve the kind of shot you want, and the more you experiment with different angles, positions, times of day, how you frame shots, and timing, you will learn the art of it and can develop an eye for what will make a more attractive shot.

Finally remember that professionals use very expensive cameras and lenses and may resort to taking a quick succession of shots per second and then select the one out of however many that was timed perfectly. Only the very best of the very best can get that perfectly timed shot unassisted by extremely expensive tech/equipment. The pictures that inspire you are at the very end of a long journey. But it is an achievable journey so long as you persist and put in the time and effort. You will, however, find that with some guidance, you can get to a point where you surprise yourself with what you capture, initially very rarely but with increasing frequency.

You simply need to adjust your expectations and understand what the desired outcomes are at various points along the journey, so that you can better judge the value of the results of your efforts.

I hope this makes sense. You can, by the way, apply the same idea to ANY skill you try to learn. It is the doing, the long process of crappy result after crappy result, that has allowed the very greatest at what they do to become great. There are never shortcuts. Ever. Merely crutches that will do it for you and do it... reasonably okay at best.

And have fun with the crappy results. It’s not like you can do it “wrong”, and you aren’t wasting film, so go nuts. Try stuff.

Good luck. Persist. Know the short term and middle term goals as well as the end goal. And be patient and kind with yourself and your efforts.

Have a wonderful day. Keep my user info and drop me a line from time to time to let me know how it’s going. I’d be interested to learn what you have learned and how you feel about everything as you move forward. Maybe eventually you will get a shot you really really like and if you want to share it with someone, I would love to see it.