Photos shown to others could mean much more to the person who took them or was involved in them. I mean, not the art, not the quality, but living the moment and all the memories that come with it. Sometimes you could almost smell the air, feel the objects, or sense the breeze, or sunlight. Take photos with whatever you can, and preserve the moment 
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Please don’t let that discourage you, @joe-appierto. With practice and some postprocessing, your photos can look awesome too. The photo of the fountain with the sunset behind it was taken with a Samsung Galaxy S4 in 2014. That was a 2-megapixel camera. You can’t get a lot of detail from a 2MP camera. The photo falls apart when you try to blow it up, etc.
That picture is 1 of about 15 photos I took of the same shot. Sometimes getting a good photo is just taking a lot of shots of similar images from slightly different perspectives. I didn’t know how good the photo was until I got it home, put it onto the computer, and compared all of them. This one stood out. I really wish I could blow it up because I would get a large aluminum print of this in a heartbeat. But as I said, since it’s only 2MP, I can’t blow it up to a poster-size print.
I am not a professional photographer, but I’ve watched A LOT of YouTube instructional videos on how to compose and take pictures. Then there is the post-processing magic that comes from using a photo editing app like Photoshop. I use photoshop express (very inexpensive) to make basic adjustments to the photo that bring out the colors, improve the detail, etc. I watched a lot of videos on post-processing as well.
Some people consider photos touched up by using photoshop to be fake. The reality of the situation from my perspective is that no digital camera is perfect. They all embed their own limitations, noise, discoloration, etc. into the photo. A probable reason your photos don’t look like you remember or have the details you recall is partially due to the limitation of the camera, partially due to technique, and partially due to just dumb luck. Using photoshop allows you to correct some of that when you get the photo home and put it on your computer. Back in the day when we used film to take photos, I had friends who were semi-pro photographers who used to only go to certain developers because those developers used to develop the photos by hand and knew how to manipulate the development process to extract the best-looking photo from the original negative. So even before photoshop ever existed, post-processing was being used to manipulate the final resulting photo.
With all that said, the photos you see of the flowers that were in my backyard, and one of my son’s cat were taken with a professional-grade camera (Nikon D850) a couple of years ago. I had just purchased that camera and took those pictures while I was learning to use the camera. You can get comparable results with a modern cell phone, but the lenses that cell phones have can’t compete with those of a real camera. Armed with a modern cell phone I could get about 80-90% of the quality that I got from the Nikon, but I would not be able to blow up the image as much because of the difference in megapixels.
Now that you know my secrets, I encourage you to invest the time watching YouTube videos on photography techniques and on basic photo editing (post-processing) techniques. Then, you too can have photos that pop off the screen and have incredible detail.
Good luck in your pursuit of this hobby. It is extremely rewarding when you finally take that magical photo that everyone loves.
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Thank you for the words of encouragement and the advice. Both are very much appreciated. 
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One more of the Death Valley dunes, from much farther off, trying to get the sunlight to accentuate the sand ripples
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Last from me for now… this is Nelson, Nevada - an excellent stop if you are ever in Las Vegas and are looking to get away from all the Vegas-ness 
Less than 40 minutes by car from the strip.
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A year’s worth of hay spontaneously combusted at my sister’s place a few days ago. Record heat in British Colombia and the farmer may have been a touch impatient and didn’t let it dry enough before bailing. It will burn and smolder for 3-4 weeks.
First time in 40 years of cattle ranching. It’s insured thankfully.
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I lost a llama and alpaca barn this way, suspecting the hay which had been put up.
The animals stood around and watched, quietly amused with all the activity.
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Camelids are like that. 
They are well-known for their dry sense of humor.
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Exactly.
(Great little emoticon)
Here are two representations of what is sometimes referred to as the Navy’s TR-3b. Depending on what you read and choose to believe it actually exists and may represent a back-engineered version of an alien vehicle. Or, it’s a pure flight of fancy. No matter – I just find it, especially the “photograph,” visually arresting.
That little white “thing” on the lower right portion of the drawing isn’t an imperfection. It represents a human figure to give the viewer a sense of scale.
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Where is this?
A lone tree clings to the edge of the canyon at Bryce. My last photo trip before the pandemic. Shot at 11mm.
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Colorado Sand Dunes
Nice, one of the few places in CO I actually haven’t been to.
