Same with the algorithm! When I first started using instagram almost 10 years ago I’d get a decent amount of views and likes and my photos were much worse than now lol. Nowadays I’m lucky to get 20 likes. It is what it is, I really don’t post much anymore because I don’t see the point.

I create photo calendars every year that I gift my extended family, a way to make use of my photos and I also love the idea of us all looking at the same photo every month, while we’re physically so far apart. I’m also going to get some big prints of my favorites and hang them up around my house as decoration.

lol I got the opposite problem! Happy with my landscape/nature/wildlife shots but absolutely can’t figure out urban photography. I love looking at urban photography but when I’m in a city I just don’t see it, and I can’t capture what I don’t see. I stopped bringing my camera whenever I go into a city. Not worth bringing it and potentially having it stolen when I don’t get anything out of bringing it anyway.

To your problem, could it be the zoom and depth perception? Different lenses will bring different views. Sometimes I take a bunch of photos and stitch them together in order to get the result I want.

At night autofocus rarely finds the right focus and manual focus gives better results. Also for wildlife photography I have a lens that has a “manual override” option, meaning I can autofocus, but if it doesn’t focus on the point I want I can manually correct it. I’ve used that quite a bit, as sometimes the autofocus will go to a point in front of the animals, for example if they’re standing in deep grass. Being able to correct it without having to switch to manual is an awesome feature.