Improving your photography by focusing on the subject

I give powerpoint programs all over the state and I give lots and lots of them (or at least I used to).  One of the most common questions that I get asked is what is the one thing I can do to improve my photography?  That is a difficult question to answer because lots of things need to be considered before answering that simply question.  For example, is the image properly exposed and have the appropriate contrast?  Is it in focus (or at least the critical part of the image)?  What are the lighting conditions?  You get the point.  Once the basic questions have been answered, the biggest single thing that can improve your photography is to tnk about what you are trying to say with this image?  What is the point of taking a photo because it can range from simply documenting a situation to trying to create some emotional impact.  Much of the public believes you can fix everything in photoshop or some other post processing software and there is this entire group of tech savy folks, who can do amazing things with software.  For example, the new hottest thing is something called HDR which is a method of expanding the exposure range to get more detail in highlights and shadows.  But most of the HDR stuff I have seen are not accurate representations of what happened in the real world.  In addition, I think many people have gotten so used to over-saturated images on the web (and those aren't real either) that we come to think of it as the norm.  Or even adding or changing something significant about the image (check out the latest Audubon magazine about a fellow who inserted one owl for another and was disqualified from the competition). Which gets us to the simple question, what is the one thing I can do to improve my photography?  Well the answer is subject, subject, subject and more subject.  Think about what the subject is and how you can emphasize the subject and how that relates to the purpose of the image.  This can apply even to those candid family photos and you probably have them with the lamp post or floor lamp splitting someone's head or growing out of their head, or having people stand too close to the wall so that the shadows take away from the people?  So remember what is the purpose of the image and how do can you emphasize your subject and the best advice is to keep it simple.  Keep it elegant and don't have a lot of clutter or distractions that take away from the subject.  Below are two images I took yesterday with friends in Edmonson County Kentucky on Indian Creek (private property).  The first image is more of a portrait of the waterfall where the waterfall is definitely the subject of the photograph.  The second image is a landscape view, putting the waterfall into the perspective of where it occurred and the various pieces of a puzzle.  In the landscape photo, I took great care where I set up the camera and tripod and what lens to use because upstream there was a bunch of dead trees scattered all over the creek.  By selecting this location and the focal length lens I used, I was able to effectively keep out the distracting elements and get a unified image where the waterfall is part of the scene and not the entire subject.