9 Photography Mistakes to avoid

New photographers who have shelled out hard-earned money on a new ‘professional’ camera can sometimes get disheartened when they don’t get the pictures they expect. I’m always chuffed when people come to the Switch to Manual workshop and work out what photography mistakes they have made for themselves. It’s even better when they also work out how to fix it – my job has been done! This week, I’ll share nine often-made photography mistakes and how to fix them.

Shaky photos

One of the most disappointing things is when you’ve been out taking photos to find you get home and the images aren’t sharp. Shaky pictures can even happen in the automatic shooting modes. So how can we avoid this most annoying of photography mistakes? There could be two reasons, and both are easily fixed. First, check your shutter speed. Camera shake can be caused by the vibration of your heart beating being captured in the photo. There’s a rule of thumb to counter the beating of your heart. Look at the focal distance on your lens; let’s say it’s 18mm – 55mm. Now, take the largest number and put that under a 1 to make it a fraction. In this example, it would be 1/55^th, or if the lens were a 70mm-200mm lens, it would be 1/200^th. This is the slowest shutter speed that you can hand-hold the lens and not get camera shake caused by the heartbeat.

What if you have used a fast shutter speed, and the subject is still blurry? In that case, you need to look at the subject’s speed. Your shutter speed must also be fast enough to capture the speed of movement. The slowest hand-held shutter speed should be fine if the subject is static. However, you’ll need a much faster shutter speed if you are snapping a running dog. Take a look at the Freeze and Blur motion blog for tips on what shutter speeds you need to use to capture movement.

No subject

Often, a new photographer will ‘see’ something in a scene and think there is a picture worth taking. However, what we think we see and what someone else notices can be two very different things. If we want to share with the viewer what we’ve seen, then we need to make it clear what they should be looking at. If I can show my five-year-old nephew a photo and they can relay to me what the picture is trying to show, that’s a big tick in the box.

Look at this picture below and decide what you think the photographer wants you to see? Is it the busy Royal Mile in Edinburgh? Could it be the Gladstone’s Land signpost? How about a line of shops?

Now, look at the picture below, taken from a slightly different angle. Did you realise the initial shot was trying to show this golden hawk above the door of Gladstone’s Land? This time, there is no doubt what the subject is.

Too many photos

One of the photography mistakes I try hard to avoid is taking too many photos. Every picture you import for editing uses more and more hard-disk space (did you know how bad memory is to the environment?). It also means more pictures to review when deciding which ones you will edit. I find it frustrating to scroll through shot after shot trying to decide which one of the exact same photos is the better. Keep your finger off the shutter button, take one shot, and then recompose. A selection of the same scene from different angles and using different zooms will give far more variety than a hundred pictures from the same position. That isn’t to say that the high-speed shutter setting is a waste of time – catching a ballet dancer at just the right point of a jump uses every one of the 30 frames per second, but each one of those frames is going to be significantly different.

Don’t believe the screen

While digital and analogue cameras have many similarities in how exposure works, the one big difference is the screen on the back of a DSLR. It’s easy to chimp away and check the back of the screen to decide if a picture is good enough or not. The problem with this is that what we see on the back of the screen is missing a whole part of the photography process – editing. When taking a picture on a digital camera, I want it to be exposed so I can reduce the amount of editing needed while ending up with a picture similar to what I saw at the time of snapping. The image on the back of a screen is a very low-quality JPEG file displayed on an uncalibrated screen.

To check if you have collected the data that gives you the best chance of editing well, you need to check the histogram. Check your manual to see how you can view a histogram. Many people state that the ideal histogram should be bell-shaped. That’s absolute rubbish; a checkerboard would have a spike on one side of the graph where the black squares are and another on the other side where the white squares are. There’ll be nothing in the middle as there are no mid-tones in the image. We want to see all the data lie between the two edges. We can edit any data that isn’t clipped on either side. So, if you’re comfortable with your composition and the histogram shows data between the two sides, you’re good to go.

Blown-out skies

Blown-out skies are a great example of photography mistakes I often see in beginners’ pictures. When we say a sky is blown out, we mean that the ground and sky have a massive difference in dynamic range. The hills of a landscape could look exactly as you see them in real life. However, the sky has lost detail in the clouds. Our eyes can see around 25 stops of light, whereas the latest cameras can only see about 15 stops. An excellent way to even out the dynamic range is to use a Neutral Density Graduated Filter. The ND Grad’s are glass filters darker at one end than the other and gradually change until they are just see-through glass. By putting the dark part of the glass over the sky, the difference between the ground and the sky is reduced, and the picture shows what we see.

We can use the histogram to identify a blown-out sky as well. The scene below has a high dynamic range. The shot on the top left looks too dark but the histogram shows everything sits between the two edges. The one on the top right looks much better when shot but look how little detail can be recovered from the sky when we do a very quick edit.

Don’t over-edit

If there is one of the photography mistakes that really annoys me, it’s the propensity to over-edit, particularly landscape-type photos. Tools such as Lightroom, Luminar, and Capture One allow amazing changes to pictures. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. That’s my feelings about editing to make a scene look like something it wasn’t. It’s easy as a new photographer to turn up for a sunset that doesn’t quite deliver to try and make it look like it did. So many times, I have seen bright pink or purple skies added to a photo, often by sheer chance, as curves or saturation sliders were pushed to 100%. My ethos is that we are trying to show the scene we saw. If you check out the winning entries in international landscape competitions, I can guarantee you’ll never see one with weird coloured skies. It’s not to say there isn’t a place for creative editing, but please don’t put it on social media with the line “wow, what a sunset!!!” (there’ll always be too many exclamation marks after the comment.

Time to focus

The onset of mobile phone cameras has made us impatient photographers. The technology we hold in our hands is fantastic. Just by pressing the button, the camera decides where the best place is to focus, takes multiple images and then edits the photos to give a high dynamic range image in a fraction of a second. Our DSLRs and mirrorless cameras choose to deploy their processing in other places. This leads me to one of the photography mistakes I see most often with new photographers.

Our professional-style cameras come set up with a half-button focus. This means we need to allow the camera a short time to focus by pressing the shutter button halfway down before pressing it the rest of the way down to take the picture. The nice thing about this mistake is that it’s easy to fix – slow down a little and wait until you hear the beep or see the focus point change colour before pressing the button.

But what if there isn’t time to wait for the focus point to resolve itself before taking a snap? For example, shooting sports photography. That’s where getting used to using back-button focus is going to help. You can read more about it here. Instead of using the half-button focus, you can set one of the buttons on your camera to focus and then the shutter button becomes precisely what it says – a button to trigger the shutter.

Don’t shoot like a swivel chair

I have the pleasure of living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Edinburgh attracts millions of tourists each year. Many of them make one of the most heinous photography mistakes. Boring photos are the bane of my life. So many pictures are taken as we see them from our standing position and, as a result, look dull and uninteresting. Most photos could be taken from a swivel chair –push along and twist around to take every picture from the same height. Changing your perspective on a scene can project your image from documenting where your camera has been to telling a story of what you’ve seen. Try changing your position by looking up or down. Physically alter your height by lying on the floor or climbing steps.

Border Control

Don’t worry – this isn’t turning into a political blog to discuss the worlds of Donald Trump or Priti Patel. Instead, it’s the last of the photography mistakes for you to avoid. If you are going to show other people your photographs, then you want them to stay interested in the picture. Ideally, they’ll look around the scene for more than a fleeting glance. The last thing you want to do is to confuse a viewer. Including part of something around the picture’s borders is an easy way to help them start questioning why something is either half in or half out. Just before you press the button, look around the borders and check if there’s something causing confusion.  In the two photos below, does it feel more comfortable when we can see the entire church steeple versus having half of it missing in the second picture?

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About the author

As well as running Edinburgh Photography Workshop, Rich Dyson is a professional photographer. His photographs are regularly used in newspapers such as The Times, Guardian and Daily Telegraph. He also had two solo exhibitions and was featured in a members-sponsored exhibition in the Scottish Parliament. You can see and buy his photography at richdysonphotography.com.