There's a moment before you raise the camera where most of the actual work of photography happens. You're looking at something, maybe light on a wall, the way two people are standing, or a shadow doing something odd, and deciding whether there's a frame there or you're imagining it. Whether something is worth committing to or you're just killing time with the camera in your hand.
That decision is what separates a photograph from a record of something that was in front of you. Both can be sharp and well-exposed, but one of them has a reason to exist.
Photographers talk about gear constantly, which is understandable because gear is concrete and learnable and something you can buy. The thing that actually determines whether your photos have any life to them is harder to discuss because it doesn't have a specification: training yourself to notice when something is worth stopping for. You build it over time.
I've seen photographers with expensive kits come back from a day of shooting with nothing usable, and I've seen people with basic setups make images that are hard to look away from. The strongest frames usually come from someone who knew why they were pressing the shutter before it opened.
You learn that by shooting a lot, looking carefully at what came back, and being honest about which frames were real and which were just hopeful. Over time the proportion shifts, but there's no shortcut through it.