"Put your camera on a tripod, helps with the focus, and shooting in low light. Go back at dawn or dusk when the light is likely to be more softer more colourful, or there might be some a mist around. Maybe wait until some ducks are in the image.
Use a polariser, this helps improve colour saturation, or perhaps a warm up filter. With a tripod you can also take really long exposures, even capture star trails. Experiment with aperture and f stop.
Use lightroom or photoshop elements (which is not too expensive) to better capture what you saw with the naked eye. The jpegs that are captured by a camera are often flat and the colours faded.
That's why all pro photographers, well nearly all photographers shoot in camera raw, and then use software such as Photoshop or lightroom. Usually they have a workflow to enhance the image, not doctor it, to better render the what they saw with the naked eye."
Polarizer; warm-up filter. Okay, I'll google those.