I think you're getting better
But admittedly there's a level of subjectivity to photography.
I think you're doing a great job finding those angles and visual interest.
What you said about finding new perspective in the car shows is my favorite thing about photography. Photos, especially stylized ones, are often NOT how we see things in real life. In real life you get to walk around the whole car and the absorb the distractions around it, and your eyes aren't packing a telephoto or wide option, and basically have infinite depth of field. Photography on the other hand is biased. You get to choose what we see, the amount of color, which detail we focus on, what's in focus, the mood, etc. Someone else who brought their camera to the same car show would get a completely different set of photos. And like you said, it can totally help you see regular objects in ways you haven't considered before.
Editing is part of the process. I would be editing every single photo — it's half the battle in getting a great image. Even with analogue, photos are manipulated in the darkroom to come out a certain way. Cameras are incredible, but not as incredible as our eyes, and sometimes photos need to be edited for realism and sometimes they need to be edited for style.
Again, it comes down to personal preference, but for most digital photos a very basic recipe I do on
every photo, even iPhone photos, is to raise the shadow detail, sometimes the overall exposure/brightness a tiny bit, give contrast a bump, correct any white balance issues, and depending on how the shot came out add a touch of saturation (or maybe take a touch away).
For me a key aspect is raising the shadows, otherwise if you add contrast it will just crush the blacks and you'll lose a bunch of detail in the dark areas of the image.
A 30-sec example of that with your truck (my edit on bottom):
I did this down and dirty in the Mac Preview pdf viewer app (not a photo editor), so it's crude. But with the raw you have a lot more control and you could also do something like throw a vignette on that to highlight the truck more. It's subtle changes, but they have an overall effect that hopefully you can see.
At the end of the day though, it's figuring out how you like
your photos to look visually, and then figuring out which sliders to adjust to make that happen.
And yes you should white balance, but my .02 is editing is always going to be part of the process.