Tell us why you are frustrated with your "learning curve". What do you mean when you say that your shots "should be so much better"? My overall thoughts are that you need to watch your backgrounds a lot more. You seem to put objects in your background that are distracting from the main subject of your photo. For example, in #2, the building and the tree in the background, even though they are out of focus (OOF), distract from the subject, which I am going to assume is the pelican, in #3, the OOF tree is a bit distracting because, even though it is OOF, it dominates the image. A viewers eye is drawn to contrast in an image, so if you have a dark object as part of an image that is composed mainly of light or bright objects, the viewer's eye goes to the dark object, almost automatically. The same is true of a bright or light object in an image composed mainly of dark objects. A similar situation exists for coloured objects. For example, in #5, you have a person in the background wearing blue jeans, a colour, that contrasts sharply with all of the other colours in the image. As a viewer, I see the dogs right in the middle of the image and then my eye goes to the blue jeans in the background, almost automatically. Some folks relate this to the so-called Gestalt theory of "seeing", but I am not sure as this kind of stuff is a bit beyond me, but it is worth thinking about.
Suggestions:
1) Do some reading about composition in photography. There are literally thousands of sites out there, for example, a series of three web articles by Ron Bigelow -
Advanced Composition -- Part I - this is the first one, the links to the others are found at the end of each subsequent web page. As well, this one contains a number of links to sites on composition -
Photography Composition Articles Library . Bryan Peterson has written a decent introductory book on the subject -
Amazon.com: Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color & Composition in Photography (Updated Edition) (9780817441814): Bryan Peterson: Books - get the updated edition.
2) Find a photographer (or two or three) whose work you admire and review their images and find ones you like. Try and figure out what you like or don't like about them and maybe use the things that you like about them to guide your photography.
3) Try and figure out what kind of photography you want to do - people, landscapes, animals, flowers, etc. and then go do it. For example, I have decided that for 2013, I will concentrate on flowers and birds, not that I will ignore other things I like to photograph - landscapes and wildlife, but my emphasis will be on flowers and birds, so I am going to go in that direction. I have bought a couple of books on the subjects and will spend a significant amount of my "photographic" time on these two areas. I am also scouring the web to learn who the "big names" are and I will follow their blogs and/or their web sites.
I hope this helps. If you want to discuss this further, post back or PM me.
WesternGuy
