Many novices will shoot 20 or 30 frames and then rush off to the next shot without a good hard look at what they just captured. The camera does a lot of work but the progress is minimal. Learning photography really starts after you press the shutter button. You have to take the time to study your images and be curious about them. The act of editing your own photographs teaches you to recognize patterns, both positive and negative, and it helps you develop a sense of what works and what doesn’t in a photograph.
So start with your own images and ask yourself a simple question: What do I see first? Sometimes the answer will be obvious. Sometimes you will see something bright in the background, or a funny shape coming out of the corner of the frame. When editing, make a mental note of distractions like this. If you see something that competes with your subject, make a mental note of where it was in the frame. Next time you see a similar shot, shift the camera a little so the distraction is gone or less prominent.
You see a lot of novices who will simply decide whether an image is “pretty” or not. That is a pretty non-descriptive term and it doesn’t help you get better. Instead look for details. Is the light even on my subject? Is my subject lost in the background? Maybe the camera was tilted a little. Identify little problems like that and the editing process becomes educational rather than something you do quickly.
A good way to do this is to dedicate a little time to the task. If you spend 15 minutes during the day shooting, spend 10 more just calmly going over the images. Pick out three that you think are interesting, and really take a good hard look at them. What did you do right, what would you do different if you took the shot again? Then try to think of how you would move the camera, wait for a different light, etc. This little bit of time will help you make every photo walk an educational experience.
Ultimately this will become second nature, like a dialogue between the part of you that takes pictures and the part of you that edits them. Each image will suggest little tweaks for the next one. You will start anticipating problems before they happen because you’ve seen them before when editing. And photography will cease to be about mashing on the shutter button as fast as you can and more about understanding why some photos work and some don’t.