What a good photograph actually needs
I have taken thousands of bad photographs with good cameras. The good ones were almost all taken while waiting for something else.
The first thing to say is that this is not an argument against gear. A camera you understand is a pleasure, and there is nothing noble about struggling with equipment. But the correlation between what a photograph cost and how long it stays with you is close to zero, and everyone who has looked at photographs for a while knows it.
Boredom is the technique
The photographs I return to were made by standing in one place long enough for the place to stop performing. The first ten minutes give you the obvious picture — the one everyone takes, the one on the postcard. The next forty give you the one that is actually there: the delivery bike that always cuts the corner, the woman who reads standing up, the particular grey the wall goes when the sun leaves it.
You cannot photograph a place you are still arriving at.
This is why so much travel photography looks the same. The photographer arrived yesterday, has a list, and is photographing the list. The picture is a receipt for having been somewhere, not a record of the somewhere.
Three practical things
Pick a frame and keep it. Choose the edges before anything happens, then wait inside them. Moving the camera is how you lose the moment you were waiting for.
Take the second picture. The first is a reflex. The second is a decision. Most people stop at the first because it looked fine on the screen, which is the least reliable place to judge a photograph.
Shoot the boring version. The wide, flat, nothing-happening frame is usually the one that holds the scene together when you look at the set a year later. The dramatic one gets boring faster than the quiet one.
What to do with the files
Wait a month before deciding which ones are good. A photograph that survives a month of not being looked at has something in it. A photograph that only works the day you took it was probably the weather.
Then print two. Not twenty — two. The wall is a better editor than the folder, because you cannot scroll past it.