Last summer, I had my first 'real camera' (my little P&S) and I decided to take a ton of pictures on vacation. At first, I was just trying to take pictures of what it looked like out in the bay. Well, that didn't work so well.
I was sitting on my family's pontoon boat and trying to take pictures of what I saw looking out around the lake. to me, i'd see these vistas of sky, water, and the shore. But when I'd take a picture, I'd either get a boring (and blurry) zoomed shot of the shore, or a boring picture of endless water and sky with a little smidge of land.
I've much later figured out why it didn't work. When I was actually looking out at the scene, I was kind of 'assembling' pictures in my head out of what I was seeing, but my camera was just recording the whole thing. You weight things by importance in your brain, your camera doesn't.
That's why practicing, just in quantity, won't work. You can sit and take those pictures for hours and hours, take hundreds of pix, and unless you make the connection that what your camera sees isn't what YOU see, you'll take crappy photos until you accidentally take a good one.
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