Here's a tip, or maybe more of a consideration.
The human brain is quite an amazing 'Zoom Lens' and 'Filter' and you may need to teach it to stop zooming/cropping/filtering quite so much and tell you what is really there.
OK, what do I mean?
Example. My mother will see a squirrel at the bottom of the garden and take a picture of it. The resultant photo is of her garden ("what Squirrel Mother?"). She will point to a little dot in the photo and proclaim "There it is, but it seemed much closer when I took the photo". If she'd actually looked at the LCD/viewfinder as a finished photo, rather than focussing on the squirrel, she's have noticed that the squirrel was a tiny spec in the whole frame as well. She actually 'saw' the squirrel in extreme close-up, her brain zoomed in and filtered out the expanse of garden.
I think most snaps are ruined by this ability of the brain to zoom in on a subject at the expense of the actual resultant composition.
So, when you look through the viewfinder, don't just stare at the subject, try and mentally step back and see the whole image, corner to corner, ask yourself "Is this really going to look OK". Imagine the LCD as a large canvas on your wall, what do you REALLY see now?
Other examples of this are sign-posts sticking out of people's heads that you only notice afterwards, cluttered and messy backgrounds that were transparent at the time.
Basically, try to see the finished image as a whole.
Did that make sense?
PS. I am guilty of all the above all the time (that's why I end up cropping everything afterwards).
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