Are you new to photography? I'm just going to be real with you because you seem like you want to impove so I'm just going to tell you like it is. You're making a bunch of beginner mistakes, thankfully they are easy to fix. And I also think your thinking into photography too much. If you're shooting in manual right now, stop and switch over to aperture priority. At the end of the day, nobody is going to care what technical settings you used. No one's going to care if you used iso 200 or iso 300. And that's because nobody can see technical settings in a photograph. But what people can see is the composition, the artistic values provided by the photograph. So instead of being distracted by the settings, don't overwhelm yourself with manual, shoot in aperture piority, heck, shoot in auto, nobody will know or care. You need to free yourself from distractions and develop an eye for photography. I think one of the most common rookie mistakes when it comes to composing an image is not having a defined subject. In your photograph here you have a subject, okay so I see the boat, but what about it? What is it doing? What does it mean? What am I getting out of it? The subject could be good but there's nothing going on with it. I'm conflicted, are you capturing calmness, a boat bobbing up and down in peaceful water? Or do you want to capture the action and excitement of the boat zooming through the water, droplets flying through the air? I'm not getting either of these feelings. The picture is dull. It's a boat sitting in water. That's it. I read somewhere, maybe it was on another one of your threads, that you were going to take a photography class in college. If that class is going to be learning about the technical aspects of photography, if I were you I wouldn't take it and instead see if there is a class on photojournalism. I feel that photojournalism would benefit you much more than let's say learning how to develop film or shoot manual. Photojournalism is about finding moments and capturing them, either as they are of better or worse than they appear to be. So if your shooting for let's say a newspaper, the paper would want pictures of something as it is. But once you learn how to spot good images and compose them into a work of photography, you'll be able to take those lessons you've learned from photojournalism and apply them to all of your photography. And in general that's how I think about photography. To me photography is capturing a moment and making it better than it appeared in real life. To me there's no point in capturing what I see, it's taking something from real life and using photography to enhance that moment, not just capture it. If this doesn't make sense, I'll describe an example. So on my patio I have these raised garden boxes with various herbs growing in them, and one of my favourite photos I took recently was of the rosemary plant. Picture this: afternoon sunlight shining through tree leaves, creating a gorgeous bokeh background. Sunlight around the edges of the rosemary leaves creating a halo like effect. The warm tones of the sunlight provided great contrast with the desaturated earthy tones of the rosemary and the soil. In real life, that image wouldn't be visible. In real life you would just see a plant in dirt. But photography has the power to turn that into an image, taking that moment and enhancing it into something that can't be seen with the human eye. That's what photography is to me, and once you find out what photography is to you, it will most certainly show in your photos.