Mind over matter

Everyone experiences this, especially film photographers: You are out walking with your camera and you come upon something that is absolutely beautiful. Since you have your camera with you, you take a photo, or a dozen, or 40. When you get back home, you find that what you shot does not match what you saw at all. The camera does not work at all like your eye and your brain. Your brain INTERPRETS things and that is how you see them. For example, you might see a dilapidated cabin in the middle of a field and completely miss the trash heap in the foreground. You were so enraptured by the cabin that you developed a sort of tunnel vision. You might see a sort of soft glow around your girlfriend that isn't really there.  The list goes on and on. Your brain enhances the appearance of things you like and ignores things it regards as extraneous or unpleasant. Your camera only captures the literal truth, even when you don't want it to. The image you captured looks nothing like as beautiful as what you saw and THAT is what you wanted to photograph.

What you have to do is carefully examine what is in front of you, breaking all the elements down, then try to figure out how to shoot something that resembles your first impression (what you remember, rather than what is in front of you). It can be done, film or digital, but it is not easy and it is not at all basic photography; it is decidedly advanced. There are a great variety of techniques for doing this and many of them are very old -- but not a whole lot has been written about many of them other than dodging and burning. If you can figure out how and when to use just half a dozen techniques, that puts you way ahead of most photographers. You can then shoot things that they can't.

Here are a few advanced techniques:
Vignetting (white outline)
Reverse vignetting (black outline)
Sabatier
Double printing
Photomontage
Soft focus/glow
Texture screening
Hand coloring
Tinting
Negative stacking
Double exposure
Toning
Split toning
Split contrast filtering

With all of these techniques, it is not a matter of either do it or don't, there are degrees to which you can do them.
Incidentally, vignetting and/or reverse vignetting will give you that tunnel vision effect you had when you first saw that cabin, and soft focus will give your girlfriend back her glow. Split contrast filtering adjusts the contrast on each of three individual layers of photographic emulsion, independently of one another. Double printing, negative stacking, double exposure and photomontage are all different ways of getting something into your photo that you only imagined was there. Toning and split toning give you color shifts (subtle or dramatic). Hand coloring (with translucent oil paints) concentrates the viewer's attention on specific details, or adds a surrealistic effect. After a while, you brain will start interpreting all colors of light that are not pretty damned obvious as white. For example, early morning sunlight is usually more blue than white, but you won't see it that way unless you are looking for it. The blue shows up mostly in shadows. Your camera does not interpret; it just shows you what's there, whether you saw it or not. Your camera has a color balance control that can make those blue shadows the "right" color, or you can leave them as is but you have to learn to really SEE what you are looking at in order to have the ability to make that decision. Incidentally, those are just a few techniques listed above. There are many more than I can possibly write about.