How to deal with 6 common photography mistakes

We all make mistakes, and this week I run through 6 common mistakes photographers make and talk through how to handle them:

1. Poor Composition

Centred subject: Placing the subject in the centre of the image. Try the rule of thirds as a way of creating a more interesting image.

Cluttered backgrounds: Distracting elements in the background take attention away from the subject. Be a ‘Visual Storyteller’ and look at the whole scene before pressing the shutter button.

2. Over- or Underexposure

Failing to adjust for lighting conditions can result in overly bright (blown-out) or too dark (underexposed) images. Look at how and where your camera is measuring light levels.

3. Ignoring Focus

Out-of-focus subject: Understand what your camera is using to set the focus and what is most suitable for the photography you are doing (e.g. central spot focusing, or a zone).

4. Overediting

Editing is a key part of digital photography, but it is very easy to over-edit and ruin a great photograph. As a general rule, keep edits simple and use easy references (such as grass) to provide a benchmark for how saturated an image should be.

5. Using the Wrong Lens

Lenses have their own characteristics and introduce distortions. This might be enlarging elements close to the lens in the case of a wide-angle lens, or compressing perspective if you are using a longer telephoto lens.

6. Poor Lighting

Photography is about using light. Bright light can upset exposure and create a lot of contrast. Golden hours and blue hours can produce very atmospheric effects, but light levels can change rapidly. 

Look at the kinds of photography you do and understand what the ideal lighting conditions are, and what you can do to compensate for lighting problems.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello again and uh welcome to another podcast. So it's Friday, and uh that's podcast day for the photography, or at least three ones. So you may have noticed that I've started putting out uh paid uh to listen podcasts, and they're a little bit more technical, they're more of a deep dive into uh a single uh photography issue. So uh hopefully you'll uh uh like some of those. So in this one though, in this particular podcast, what I'm gonna do uh this time and next time is to go through some common photography mistakes. So I'm gonna pick six, which might be a bit ambitious, but we'll see how we go, and uh just talk through them and how you can get around them. So, number one, uh sorry, before I start with number one, please remember to like and subscribe, follow all of those things. Now, uh the first one is composition, poor composition. So this is something that I've spoken about quite often. If you have been on any of my uh workshops or certainly some of the webinars, this is something I do have a deep dive on. And in fact, if you are listening, well, actually doesn't really matter when you're listening, but in February, I think it's February, we're looking at composition in a mini workshop. If you're listening to this after February 26th, then um just keep an eye on the mini workshop page, and uh there might well be something coming up. So, what's the mistake that most people make? Well, that it's really basic, they just stick their subject right in the centre of the frame. And um, thinking back to actually my father, um, who hasn't been with us for a while, unfortunately, but um I do remember with his photography, so I got started um as a child, and um yeah, his idea of a portrait was to have somebody right in the middle of the uh the frame, and you could sort of see it was a person, um, they're really small. So um that's the kind of mistake, just sticking them in the sense. So the the obvious thing and the the th or the place to start is with the rule of thirds. Now, if you're familiar with that, I'm sorry about that. If you're not, this should give immediately actually allows you to create much more interesting photographs. And the reason I talk about it is that often it's there is a grid that can be displayed on your screen, whether you're using a smartphone or a DSLR or a mirrorless camera. Quite often you can just select that through one of the menus, and then suddenly you've got this guide as you're setting up the photograph, and it just reminds you to uh reposition your subject. Now, initially it might find really odd because the way rule of thirds works is that you basically divide the viewfinder horizontally and vertically into thirds. So you add two vertical lines, two horizontal lines, and then what you do, you place the focal point, so your subject, and if it's portrait, I'm gonna say your subject's I. I usually use the eye that's nearest to me, and place that on one of the four crossover points. So with those lines, you'll have four points there where lines cross, or you simply position your subject on one of those lines, either the horizontal or the vertical, it doesn't really matter. And in fact, I recommend if you're new to this, or even if you're not, just experiment. Try it with different lines, just see what the effect is, see what you get. Um but when you do that, it does create a more visually more interesting picture. And this is going back to an old definition that I heard years ago now, uh, that the most interesting picture was the one that the viewer spent more time looking at. And I don't mean in that kind of perplexed what on earth are they trying to photograph because I can't make head or tailor this, but it's just something that as they look at it, they begin to see more into the image. And the other thing to remember, because you will be creating space within the image. Now, some people refer to this as negative space. I don't like that expression because I don't think it is negative, it's something that actually contributes to the feel and the story of the image, so it's positive space, but we're natural storytellers, so as soon as soon as there's space there, we will start to create create our own little story about why there's space there. So it might be somebody thinking about the future, or something might be happening in the future, it might be in the past, all that kind of stuff. So this is sounding a bit odd. Um I recommend you take the uh the workshop, or even better, um, have a look at the uh my online uh photography course. So that takes you through DSLR of mirrorless photography, but go through all of this kind of thing. So, thing number one, support composition. So the first thing is to just look at how you're positioning, and the second thing is to become what I refer to as a visual storyteller. So there are podcasts on this, I think they were a while ago now, so I might have to do another one. But essentially, what I mean by that is you look at the whole frame, you're looking at your subject, but you're also looking at what's going on around the subject. How does that tell a story? Does it give some idea and this doesn't have to be a long story, by the way, but does it give the viewer some additional information about your subject? So if it's a wild animal, it might be the kind of environment they live in. Um, if it's person, if it's portrait, you can have their home or where they work, but it'll tell something, tell the viewer something more about that person or that subject. So you begin to create a story, and by creating a story, it encourages you to look at the whole scene rather than just get fixated on the subject and not notice that there's a tree growing out of their head, or there are two dogs that had a fight and they're making up in the background, whatever it might be. So composition is about positioning the subject in a way that starts to lead the viewer to create some sort of a story, make it more interesting, and also there's opportunity to visually add additional information that will make the whole image much more powerful, much stronger. So that's poor composition. The next one is either over or under exposure. So this is important, and I've spoken about this um a few podcasts ago. I was talking about a e-lock as one of the um functions on um most cameras, I'm not say all cameras, but most cameras that can be easily overlooked. So obviously, if you overexpose or underexpose, so so when you overexpose, basically the image is too bright, and certain object, certain parts of the image will get blown out, they'll just be white, you can't make any detail out of them. And conversely, if you've underexposed, you've got a very dark image, and it might be really hard to see the subject or what's going on, or your subject might be really dark, and you've got a nice, bright, nicely exposed background that really isn't what you're going for. So it's really important, first of all, to understand how your camera measures exposure and how it decides what is going to contribute, which parts of the image are going to contribute to coming up with that overall exposure um setting. And this is where you might need to dive into your menus or read the manual a little bit. Um I'm not I don't push that a lot because I'm not a big reader of manuals, but basically, you you have most cameras have different ways of measuring the available light, so it might be across the whole frame or sections of the frame. So it's really important to understand what options you have. So you might have something like spot metering, which is where I what I tend to use, and that will use generally the central point of the viewfinder, and it will just get the exposure right for that and not worry about the rest of the frame, and there will be various steps between that and then exposing for the full frame. So you need to go have a look at your camera and see what the options are. If you still don't understand it, again on the course and on other mini workshops and things like that. I have dived into that in more detail. But once you understand how the camera and where the camera is measuring light, that means you're much less likely to get a big exposure error. Um, AE lock is a way of um exposing for one particular area of the viewfinder. So you you would just point the center of the viewfinder, let's say, at the um the area you want to correctly expose. You hold AE lock down, then just recompose. So just basically change uh how you've where you've put your subject in the viewfinder, and then take the photograph, hit the shutter button, and the camera will work with that original exposure measurement, not the one it's seeing as the shutter closes. So hopefully that's making some sense. If you want to get a bit more adventurous, you've also got exposure compensation. So it is important to understand how that works, not not only because it might be something you might want to make use of, I and again it depends on what sort of photography you're doing. So it might be one of those things you never use, or it might be one of those things that's actually quite handy. And exposure compensation just allows you to force the camera to slightly over is overexpose, and it's normally set in thirds of a stop, both um in terms of overexposing and underexposing, normally up to about three full stops. So you can force the camera to overexpose or underexpose, but the reason it's useful to know about it is I find um it depends on the camera and how clumsy you are, I guess. But I sometimes find I've accidentally reset exposure compensation, which gives me these really weird exposures, which I don't want. And then finally, you can do bracketing. Now that's a whole other subject, but essentially, bracketing is where the camera will take three images, it will take one at the at the exposure level it thinks is correct, but also it will take one image overexposed and one image underexposed, and the degree to which those additional images are either under or overexposed is set by you on a little scale that you um may well see on the top of your camera body or in the um the screen at the back. So if you've got a little scale, then you don't know what it is, it's probably that. Okay, so the improv the reason for mentioning this though is that if you can get a correct exposure, that is really really good because with a correct exposure you can do a lot with an image, but if you've got a bad exposure, you might have completely lost that shot or you might have something really strange. Equally, if you want to get really creative and start using exposure, either underexposing or overexposing, as a way of creating a more interesting image, then that can be a really fun thing to play with. Okay, the third thing is ignoring focus. So that's and then this comes down to just understanding how your focus system works. Um, it's good to know how to manually focus. Um, probably most of what you do you'll auto-focus, but again, as with exposure, you can set up on your camera how it's how it focuses. So, in other words, um how it decides what it is you want to focus on because you want to tell it what to focus on, the camera won't know. It will just go with whatever happens to be on the focusing points that you've selected. So, again, this um much like the exposure, uh, you might have a single focal point that you use. I tend to do that because I'm often shooting at something through a lot of foreground that could be moving in the wind, so it might be grass or branches. If there's a bit of wind and I'm trying to take a shot, um, and probably in that situation I might do a short burst, but I might have one perfectly exposed image and then a whole bunch that are out of focus because the um the foreground has moved and changed the focal point because the camera's now looking at a bit of grass and the things are ha. That's what I want to focus on. So, do you understand whether you're focusing on a single point or an a group of points, or it might even be an area, you're looking at the sort of overall area. Um, the other thing I will mention on focus, and this is a technical thing that I should probably do a deep dive on actually, uh, now that I think about it, but that's back button focus, and this is where you just change the physical control that's uh determining how you set the focus. So, normally it is when you push the shutter button halfway down, that's when the camera will take the exposure reading and set its focus. But you can on a lot of cameras just change that function onto a different button, and that's put on to normally one of the buttons on the back of the body, and you press that down to set your focus. Um, also, there'll be a couple of ways of focusing. I'm not going to go into those um here, but I may well do a deep dive onto focus because I think it's something that is um it's important to understand, particularly if you are getting your shooting images and they look okay, but you you've they're actually quite blurry. I did a podcast again um a few weeks ago about um focus and understand the mechanics of it and also where it is actually correct and it looks wrong, but also where it um it's basically wrong is the other one. Okay, item number four is over-editing. So editing is something I don't talk about a lot simply because uh there are a lot of editors out there, the the actual user interfaces vary from time to time as well, they update them. Um, I use Photoshop uh simply because I'm used to using Photoshop, but my editing is very brief. I rarely spend more than two minutes on an image, and it's mostly about correcting horizons, first of all. So I guess that would go back to the composition aspect. It might be recropping because when I got the original shot, when I look at it, I don't like where the subject is, so I might reposition, so I might compensate for um a poor composition on my part when I took the image, or it might involve zooming in, all these sorts of things, and then of course there's varying the brightness, the colour, intensity, maybe making it black and white. Um, it and a lot of it is about setting contrast. And I if you get the contrast right, then the image can kind of pop out at you, and it suddenly feels like you could almost reach out and touch a subject, but there is a trap there, and that it's very easy to over-edit and also not understand the difference between contrast and sharpness, which is um a whole other subject as well. So rather than going into a massively deep thing on this, what I would simply say is if you are editing, by all means edit, because I think that's a fundamental part of digital photography these days. Uh pretty much all of the, I would say all of the images that I publish have been edited to one degree or another. But don't go crazy. Uh, generally, small if you've got a correct exposure, if you're when you shot the image and the exposure was good, you probably don't need to do too much to the contrast and the lighting. So just do use small amounts of adjustment, don't go crazy. Sometimes I'll deliberately overadjust so that it looks really horrible, and then I'll just work my way back until it feels normal. And often I find that by doing that, the adjustments I make to get that image that feels right, uh not very much at all. And secondly, with colour, because I do a lot of wildlife, one of the measures I'll use to get make sure the colour isn't too crazy is to just look for something green, normally grass or it might be leaves, but most of us have access to grass of some description, hopefully it's green grass, and so greengrass in the image should look something like the greengrass we have around us, and um that then gives a sort of benchmark for the saturation of an image, how much how intense the uh colours are. Okay, um, using the wrong lens, so um so okay, using the wrong lens, so you might be limited because if you've got one lens, uh you don't have a lot of choice, so you might have a couple, hopefully, a bit of telephoto. But just be aware, and it's it's really good to practice this, be aware of the distortions that lenses can put in. So, for example, with wide angle, you tend to um get things close to the lens tend to look bigger and things further away smaller. So, if you're using portraits with a wide angle, if you get really close to someone within um you know two, three metres, the chances are if they're looking directly at you, their nose is going to be quite large, and then the ears might be relatively small depending on the characteristics of that particular lens. So it is important to try and use the correct lens. So as you use a sort of mid-range focal length, maybe say 85 to um 130, something like that, you tend to get more of a flattening. So that's more that's why those kind of lenses are generally regarded as better for portraits, because you don't get so much distortion. And then as you go longer, what tends to happen is that you compress perspective. So uh the example that I always think of, and I remember this as a kid actually, just watching on television, watching athletics, where it might be 400 metres, so they're running in an oval and they come around the um curve and they start running along the straight, and you've got that view of the camera looking right down the straight, and you've got one runner coming, the leading runner, and then a few seconds later, the the next runner comes around the corner, and it looks like that second runner is right on the shoulder of the first runner. But when you change the angle and you look at it from the side, you realize that the the second runner, the one in the uh the one behind, is actually some distance behind. So remember, long telephotos will start to compress perspective. So, in other words, it will make things further away look closer to your subject. So think about that, and obviously, wide angle will do the reverse. You can have things that are um quite close and they look far away. So it comes back to that old um uh the the message in the the uh review mirrors in cars on the door mirrors uh that subjects in the or objects can be closer than they appear, or whatever it might be. So there's a distortion with lenses. So the key thing really about using correct lens is to obviously you want to get your subject, you might want to get in closer, that would tend to point towards a telephoto anyway. Uh, but understand the characteristics of your lens and what it's doing. Some lenses, um pro lenses, you wouldn't get, you wouldn't expect to see this, but if you've got a cheaper lens, you may well find that the aperture makes a difference. If you're shooting at F8, you might get quite nice performance. But when you start pushing either end, you start to get distortions on the edges, that kind of thing. So if you're not sure, or as a way of just experimenting, just try shooting with the lenses that you have. If it's a zoom lens, try it at maximum zoom, minimum zoom, try it at different apertures, see if there's any difference in the images. And it's important to know this because if you are using those lenses on you know trip of a lifetime, something like that, you don't want to come back with a set of photos that are horribly distorted when you suddenly look at them, particularly when you put them up on a TV screen or a computer screen. You want to you want to understand what your lenses um actually do to the image because there is distortion, most lenses will add some sort of distortion to them. Uh packages like Photoshop, I can't speak for others, but I assume others will do the same. Uh, they will take the lens information from the metadata, assuming that you are well, I always shoot raw, so I've always got my metadata. But Photoshop can interrogate the metadata and it actually has uh correcting tables for the different lenses at different apertures. So uh when you select for it to change to actually add allow for the characteristics of the lens, I've forgotten what that's called out here's an option. Uh it will just change the image and it does pop the image. The image is definitely different in um with the lenses that I use at the moment. So, lenses one thing. What I will say on that though, flipping that, a really good thing to do if you want to test your creativity is to just shoot with one focal length or shoot with one lens. Uh, maybe not the lens you would normally use for a particular situation, because that's a great way of just um getting a bit creative, getting to know your camera gear a bit better, because you you you know, I don't think you can know too much about your camera gear really, uh, because it the more you know, the more you're able to handle um difficult situations, and and the more you know about compensating for shortcomings in the gear that you have, because everything uh will have you will hit a shortcoming at some point or another. Okay, okay, then the very fast uh sorry, the very last one I want to talk about is poor lighting. So um, you know, photography is about light ultimately, and having the right lighting is is definitely makes the difference between a great photo and a pretty awful one if if you've got the wrong lighting. So I guess looking at wildlife, as that's primarily what I shoot, but this applies anywhere, really. Um, avoid harsh midday sun. You get very strong shadows, you get very strong highlights, it's very easy to burn out aspects or parts of the image. Uh, also, if you're trying to get an animal portrait, first of all, they'll tend to be looking away from the sun unless they absolutely have to look in that direction. Because remember, a lot of animals, uh, if you're looking at wild animals, they have to stay alert for predators or prey, but and and in some cases both. So I'm thinking. Cheetahs here that obviously uh will run down small mammals, but um equally uh um can be attacked by lions because lions don't like them in their um area. So if you've got harsh sunlight and this also applies to portraits, people will tend to squint. Animals will first of all you'll tend to look away, but even if you're looking away from the sun or the source of the light, if it's very bright, uh we will naturally just close our eyes, uh close our eyelids so that we're sort of squinting a bit to protect our eyes from the bright light. So um be very conscious of that. So if you're switching to portraits, people portraits, people, the best lighting is very flat, an overcast day is perfect because then the eyes tend to be open and we connect with people by looking in their eyes. I mean, not in a weird way, but you know, just the windows of the soul and all that. So you want the eyes open if you can, because that way, even if they're not looking directly at the camera, I mean if they are that's great, but you do want the eyes open, so an overcast soft lighting is perfect. So if you're in a studio, maybe a light box, something like that, to create that softer light, but that's perfect, and uh that's really what you're going for. If you uh now with wildlife, particularly, um you want to go for golden hour, ideally, so that's the hour after sunrise, the hour before sunset, so there's two of them in a day. Um blue hour potentially, so that's the hour after sunset, and the hour before sunrise, so when the sun's just um coming up. So that they give you really nice lighting, but the thing that you have to remember, and it's easy to forget if you get a bit caught up in things, is that the light levels are changing continuously, so you're gonna have to keep re just making sure that your exposures are correct because our eyes and our brain will compensate automatically. Uh, the camera won't necessarily, depending on how you've got it set up, and um, even if you've got say aperture priority set up, you may find that your shutter speed is dropping off quite alarmingly, and all of a sudden you're at the limits of hand holding or whatever you're doing, so you need to get a tripod. Now, the other thing you can do is use fill-in flash. Uh, I don't recommend it for light wildlife, uh, but again, for the portraits, you can use it, and it can be quite useful if you've got a strong light behind the subject. So, and the little pop-up flashes that you get on a lot of camera bodies um are just fill-in flashes. They're not what I would refer to as proper flash guns or proper flashes, which have um that they can pop out quite a lot of light and give a good level of illumination. The little things you're going to find um on the top of the camera body that pop up when you set them or when you select them are really fill-in flashes, but they can be useful if you've got a bright background, then it might be worth trying a few with a fill-in flash, but they can tend to um flatten the look of the image a little bit as well. So um definitely be aware of that. Okay, so that is it for um this podcast. So just to remind you, we spoke about composition, some tips there, over and underexposing, focus editing, using the wrong lens or the right lens, and then poor lighting. So these are common mistakes or the pe things people forget about. So hopefully you're not making mistakes with those. But if you are, um you don't have to tell me, but there are some tips there to uh to correct things. So I hope you found that useful. I'll be back on Friday, and uh, I'm gonna talk about another eight um things eight, seven, yeah, something like that. Anyway, another few problems, uh, another few obvious things that um are easy to forget about and uh just simplify that. And as I say, there are uh now some uh well they're subscripts subscription only um uh episodes, so you're welcome to jump on those, but they are a little bit more technical and they do deep dive, so they're definitely not for everyone, and that's the whole point of um separating them off. Okay, thank you so much. I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.