One of the reasons why I love to shoot nature shots is for the sole purpose of practice. Nature has everything that helped me not only get started doing photography, but get exponentially better as well.
Nature has the benefit of being both static and dynamic at the same time. For a nice landscape shot, not much will move over time. This allows someone to spend as much time as they need getting a perfect panorama shot, even practice getting an HDR image. Scenic shots were perfect for me to get the hang of a new camera or lens, play with color settings, get the exposure just right, etc.
When I started playing around with shots of insects and animals, I had to speed up how quickly I could change the settings on my camera. On a good day, this meant just a quick adjustment to the aperture or ISO, but I always had to pay close attention to my camera's metering system in order to get exposure just right. Bug shots helped me take into account composition and making use of different angles. Bumping up the aperture could help bring the background into focus, only too much so and I would need to increase exposure.
Just using nature to practice photography has almost made adjusting the composition and camera settings become a completely subconscious routine.
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