>>3809572One of the biggest reasons I think that most photos probably don't come out as good as what it looks like irl is because it's two dimensional. What you're seeing in front of you might look cool in person, but you're losing a lot of why you're excited about the subject when you're taking a photo.
Something that can help and this kind of sounds silly, but closing one of your eyes so you can see how it actually looks when it's flat. Then you have to make sure that your subject is actually interesting enough and figure out how you can accentuate it and cut out the things that don't make it interesting. A lot of times that just means closing in to the subject and messing around with the depth of field.
Your first photo is kind of super ordinary partially because there isn't a clear subject and that it's taken from a bland, normal perspective. You could have been made it a bit more interesting if you took a much closer photo of the ice covered trees. Or from a unique perspective, like get really close to the graffiti'd pipe and point up to get some of the artwork and the frozen tree and the sky from a perspective that you wouldn't usually see.
I don't claim to be a great photographer or anything, but here's a photo of a boring little floating dock. I could have taken it from my on the ground perspective and it probably wouldn't look interesting, it's just an empty dock on a lake. Taking the photo from a different perspective than what we're used to makes it look interesting and you don't really know what you're looking at.
I hope this helps.
