101 Ways To Improve Your Digital Photography
Here are some of the rules I care about!:
7. Get closer. Robert Capa said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, then you aren’t close enough”. Next time you take a picture, try to walk a few steps towards the subject, or even pick out a detail of a scene rather than the whole thing in one. You’ll be surprised.

8. One subject only. Pictures often work better if there’s a clear subject. Competing subjects are hard to handle.
11. Change your point of view. Every day we see the world from our own perspective, usually from our own eye level. Change your perspective by shooting from a frog’s perspective or from within a fridge and create an unusual look that people won’t forget.

18. Get familiar with design principles. Learn about line, shape and form, texture and so on.
21. Don’t use digital zoom. It will make your images look bad. Find a way to switch it off on your camera. If you need to, do the upsizing in post processing. (this goes for video as well!!!)

32. Use the histogram. It’s an invaluable tool for you to see right away if your image is over- or underexposed. If the graph is cut off to the right, it’s over exposed, if the graph is cut off to the left, that means underexposure. It’s fine to overexpose if that’s what you want, but the histogram will actually let you *know*. Overexposure is usually worse than underexposure.

37. Set the proper white balance. If you want accurate colours, the best way is to use custom white balance. For this you take a picture of a white or gray surface, then tell your camera to use this image as a white balance reference. (again, this goes for video as well!!!)
49. Straighten your images. If you didn’t get your images straight during shooting (happens to me all the time), straighten them during post processing.

50. Crop. Sometimes a creative crop can spice up a composition that otherwise would be dull. The vast number of megapixels in today’s cameras often allows the cropping of images without too much damage. This is especially true for images that you resize for the web.
52. Limitation is great. Yes, another good way to help you advance your creativity is another form of limitation. “Lock yourself in your bathroom and take 100 pictures” – “Shoot 100 pictures from the same spot”. Give it a try.

5. Believe in yourself and trust your instincts. If you like the shot, then it’s a good shot. Period.
partly via Swissmiss