5 Wildlife photography Mistakes After The Shutter

The shoot felt great. So why does the final gallery disappoint?

In the final part of our wildlife photography mistakes series, we're covering the mistakes that happen after you've already got the shot — in your review and editing process:

• The culling mistake that means you might be missing your actual best frame
• Why over-sharpening in post can do more harm than good
• The cropping decision that costs you more than you think
• How inconsistent colour and white balance can undercut an entire series
• The one habit that turns every missed shot into your next improvement

We're also wrapping up the whole series with a full recap of everything we've covered across all four episodes — from the field to the final edit.

This is Part 4 of 4 in our wildlife photography mistakes series. If you've enjoyed this arc, we'd love it if you subscribed so you don't miss what's coming next.

Got a photo you think went wrong? Send it our way — we might feature it in an upcoming episode.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

So you've had your wildlife photography shoot, you come back, and when you start looking at the final gallery or your final selection of images, um, it all feels very disappointing and it's not quite as exciting as you remember it being when you were there. So that's what I'm gonna be talking about in this final part of uh going through wildlife photography mistakes that people make. And with this one, we're gonna talk about mistakes that people make after they click the shadow. So I've spoken about keeping pictures sharp, I've spoken about composition, I've spoken about the mistakes you make before you even pick up the camera. So we're gonna just round things off with looking at what happens afterwards. So please remember to like and subscribe and all those good things, and I will dive straight into it. So mistake number one this is where you're post-processing, and this is it's a very easy mistake to make. And I think once you start getting into it, you end up going down a little bit of rabbit hole, and there doesn't seem to be a way out of it. And that's basically when you over-process in in post or you're over-sharpening. And what happens is that it pictures very quickly start to look really, really strange, and um it's just and it's easy to get into that trap thinking, oh, if I just do another sharpen or something else, that's gonna cure it, and it doesn't, it just makes it even worse. You end up going down this rabbit hole uh where the more you do, the worse the image gets. So, what do you do with um post-processing? Because you don't want artifacts, you can uh and and it's very easy once you've got a bit of experience with this to see images that have been over there's too much sharpening, there's too much of this stuff going on. So the thing to do with post is and with editing is to keep it to a minimum. So the kind of things I'll do, so I rarely spend more than two minutes on an image. If I do, I feel like I may have started going down a rabbit hole, so I'll often just stop because it tends to happen, I'm a bit tired. So what do you do? Well, first of all, I hope you've been shooting in RAW, and um the the um the images I get, I think, are 10-bit. So I'll always knock it down to 8-bit just so I can produce JPEGs at the end of it as at least one of the outputs. But if you're shooting in RAW, the reason I always recommend that is that you've got the full information that the camera has recorded, so you've got all of the finer variations in tone, in colour, and um, that's going to give you the best chance of producing a really good image at the end of it, uh, the end of the post processing. If you go straight to JPEG, yes, it's faster, it takes up less room on your memory card in your camera, but in my opinion, it's a false economy because if you get that shot that is absolutely amazing, you just didn't dream you could catch something like that, and you've just shot it as a JPEG, you're really limited on what you can do with it and still have it look good. What happens with JPEGs is the moment you start processing this so that you can maybe produce a really good um large printed image of it, which you know you might want on your wall somewhere, uh, very quickly that image will start to come apart. You'll get a lot of artifacts, you you get the colours not fine, all this sort of stuff. It's just not good. Whereas and always remember actually that when you're looking at an image on your digital camera, it is likely to be a JPEG that you're looking at, it's not the raw. Now, when you look at a raw image, if you've not done this before, a correctly exposed raw image looks very flat, and so you might look at it and think, uh you know what went wrong. But that's actually fine, that's what you want because with a flat image, with a little bit of post-processing, not very much. Like I say, I never do more than about two minutes, you can really make that image pop, but it's just knowing what you're doing. So the key thing is don't go crazy, slow down. Um, just correct for lighting, and that's just looking at the histogram. And the thing I tend to look for, first of all, when I'm looking at the histogram of the image, I in um I tend to use Photoshop at the moment, but there are alternatives out there, and I'm thinking of changing to be honest. But anyway, that's another another story. You sometimes get a line where there's no data, so you so what you're looking for is basically an arc of data that goes across the the whole dynamic range of the image. So you're going from dark to light, if I remember correctly, um on histograms, because I can remember never remember that bit. Um, but if you've got an area where there's no data, so it'll just be blank, there won't even be a line there, then just move the slider up so that you've excluded that um from the the information that the uh the software is working with. So that will help you. It just means you're working with areas um or data in the file which just actually has data from the picture and it isn't just you know nothing. So that's the first thing. Um the important thing though is to just um I do a quick correct for brightness, just so that I can see. I don't always take what the software's giving me, but I just look at what difference that makes to the image, and then what I generally do is just um reduce highlights and reduce the whites a little bit, drop the color down, and then just work on contrast. So I'm working with the curve, is the option in Photoshop. So I'm not sure what you're using, but it's where you're basically setting um the highlights, the lights, the mid-ranges basically, and then the the highlights and the dark areas, shadows. And I just try and balance them so that the contrast is where I want it. And and for me, the way I know I've got there is the image kind of pops out of the screen a little bit, suddenly it starts looking three-dimensional, and I don't I do the minimum I can with those sliders, but I do want that image to start having the correct contrast, and now it looks like it's a three, it's three-dimensional, and then I'll bring the colour back in. But again, with um with colour, what I'll use as a reference is grass or leaves, but generally, not always, if I'm in deserts and things, but generally I'm shooting um animals where there's something green, and so I'll try and get the colour right for the greens and use those as my reference. And if I'm not sure what green should look like, I look out the window because where I live, there's usually greenery around, whether it's grass or leaves or anything like that, and that just makes sure I'm not oversaturating the image. So a lot of people like to do that, and look, maybe you want to oversaturate slightly, but don't go mad because it just looks they they just unless that's you you're going for a more arty uh result, but don't massively oversaturate. So the key thing with process post-processing is just to keep it really simple. If you're a real whiz on Photoshop, Lightroom, or something else, you know what you're doing, then obviously just you know knock yourself out. But if you're not, um keep it very simple, minimize the adjustments and just go for a contrast that looks good. Um, I like I prefer to do that in black and white because then I'm just purely looking at contrast, and then just bring the colour back in um so that it looks natural or it looks as you remember it, and that's pretty much it. Um, so that's mistake number one is just over sharpening and over-processing the image. Now, the second mistake is culling too fast or too slow. Now, this is an absolute classic, and this is something that I've seen a lot of people do the moment they've taken the photograph, they'll shoot a bunch of images, they immediately look at them on the back of the camera and then they start deleting. That really is the worst thing you can do. So don't do it. Uh, what I recommend you do is just keep everything you've got. Um, but I mean, by all means, there might be some you want to pick out if you're sharing on the fly, like on Facebook or Instagram or somewhere and you want to share with your friends, by all means. But keep the original images. Now I always copy everything off the cards in the camera onto separate um solid state drives that I use when I'm traveling, and then they go on to my final storage when I get home. But then go and look at them, don't look at them for a few months, leave it at two, three months, and then have a look at them objectively. And the reason I say that is that when we look at images the moment we've shot them, we have in our mind what we were trying to get, the image we were trying to photograph, and you know, we may have got it, we may not, but where the disappointment comes in is where we miss that shot, or it's a little bit overexposed or underexposed. We just scrap it straight away. If you wait and you look at them again, you forget what that is. So you're you you take away those blinkers, if you like, those blinders, um, which is the image you were hoping for, and you're just now looking at the image objectively as what it is. And when you do that with a little bit of post-processing, again, not very much, you might suddenly bring that image out. And I've done this with images that initially I thought were pretty ordinary and I wasn't going to bother with, but I kept them. Then I looked at them months later and just had a put them through some basic post-processing, and suddenly there I really liked them. So some of my favorite images came about that way. So the bot

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SPEAKER_00 10:23

the mistake there to keep this simple is not to cull things too fast. Um, if you are doing a set for somebody else or even for um a photo book or something, I do recommend

(Cont.) 5 Wildlife photography Mistakes After The Shutter

SPEAKER_00 10:41

that you do an initial short list. I'm not to say culling, but short list, but but drop them down, be aware of how many images you want, and maybe so if you want a hundred images, let's say, for uh photo book, um, just drop those down to maybe 150, something like that, but be a little bit or even 120, so you don't end up with too many, and then you can do that final um short list or the you know the final list. But um, yeah, don't don't delete stuff off the camera. That that's that's my recommendation. If months later, I mean if you look at them later and they're clearly uh, you know, your your settings were way off, and that you can't really pull anything out of them, then by all means get rid of them. But um, for the things that seem wrong at the time, but they're you know not bad photographs technically in terms of exposure and focusing on all the rest of it, um, just just keep them and look at them again later. So that was mistake number two. Mistake number three is cropping too aggressively. So there are two things here. Um, I've already covered one of them in the second episode of this series, which is about composition, it's about where you're positioning the your animal, because it's wildlife, and what you've got around it, and not overcropping when you're zooming in, so don't crop too much in the camera. But it's just as possible to crop too aggressively when you're doing your post-processing. And two things happen. So, one is that you might lose some of the power of the composition, so by having that negative space around that you can use that provides context, uh, might provide mood. You you start to lose the power of that if you go to if you're too aggressive when you're cropping. And of course, the other thing that happens, particularly if you're not using the full resolution of your camera, so I've already said make sure you're using raw, but you also want to be using the biggest file size that the camera will support. So most cameras give you the option of shooting either in the the biggest image that you can capture or reducing it down. Now you might want to do that if you're only ever going to be shooting JPEGs for Facebook, for example, where they don't need to be very big. And the advantage of shooting smaller files is that obviously they take up less room on the um storage in the camera, and also when you're shooting bursts, often you you can have much longer bursts because the actual files that the computer's writing to storage are much they're much shorter, so the write time is much shorter, so you will often your burst speeds will just go on indefinitely if you if you make them small enough. So that's all fine, but if you are cropping too aggressively, you lose resolution. So this is where your megapixels come in. So if you've got a 24 megapixel camera, that's about the resolution, or that's the number of pixels or the maximum number of pixels that you will be able to have in an image. And the pixels come into play when you're talking about resolution. And if you're doing a photo book or something like that, there's um some of the software I like. So Blurb is one that I've used, I like, but they're um the software they use that you can download to actually create the book, it will warn you if you're making the image too big on the page for the size of page that you're going for in the final print. It will warn you if your resolution is too low. So you really want to make sure that you are creating files, first of all, that have the maximum resolution that you can shoot, because that gives you more options when it comes to cropping later. But also, if you don't get don't go crazy when you're cropping, because if you if you go if you're too aggressive, you'll end up with such uh um a low resolution image, it's just gonna look awful, um, unless that's what you're going for. So if that's the situation, just accept a wider shot, a wider view, and um run with that one. So that's mistake number three, cropping too aggressively. Um, mistake number four is ignoring colour and white balance uh consistency. So this is important where you have a sequence of images, it might be in a photo book, it might be in a portfolio, but it's the same scene, but you the colour or the white balance is inconsistent. So, what I mean by that is the colours look different. When you go from one frame to another, things look different. Um, you know, the whites are different, so the colour balance is different. Um, so just pay attention to that and just make sure that you are using the correct settings and consistent settings across the series so that it looks like um a series of images that work together, that they belong together. If you if you don't do that, it it's gonna look really messy and it will definitely look wrong in a in a photo book. Um, you might you might not be able to identify exactly what's gone wrong, other than that you know the images look different, and that's likely to be what it is. Your colour and your white balance um are mismatched um across the series. So that's just another thing to be conscious of, be consistent in how you are um producing those final results. And um the final mistake is I think uh possibly the most important one, to be honest, and that's not learning from shots that you either missed or didn't come out the way you wanted to. Because for me, photography is it's an activity where you're constantly learning. I'm always learning, and I've been I've been learning for a good 50 years now. Um, and I hope that it's not because I'm you know particularly stupid. Um, I hope not, but there's always something new, and the thing about photography is there we all we all have weak areas, you know, none of us start out being really good photographers, or I don't well, there might be one or two, but most of us don't. We have to learn it. So the way to learn anything is first of all to practice, but it's to practice so that you're consistent. Now, it doesn't matter at that stage if you're consistently bad or consistently good, as long as you're consistent and you can keep reproducing the same results and you know how you got that result. And the reason I say that is that once you are consistent in one area, you can then look at what's wrong with it, with what you're doing. It might be with your use, it might be how you're using aperture, uh, it might be shutter speed, wherever it might be. And then you can do work on that area, just focus on the area for a while, try new things, um, try um uh just build up your skill set basically so that you gradually start getting better. But as you get better, you're still consistent. So you're now shooting, you can shoot the same image again and again, but it's a much better image than it was two months ago. And that's the most important aspect, in my opinion, of really enjoying photography. It's like um it's like playing. So when I learned to play a guitar, I started out, it felt like I had a bunch of bananas at the end of each of my arms, and I was having to physically put my fingers on each string to make a chord, and it was just awkward. You know, the chord changes took not quite minutes, but they certainly weren't very slick. But if you keep at it, I suddenly hit the point where I could change chords pretty quickly, and then what the racket I was starting to produce on my guitar, or I was producing on my guitar, started to sound a bit like music. And this is the thing with photography. The chances are you've got areas that you're not quite so good at, or you could be better at, or you look at your images and you look at things that aren't quite right, and this is the important thing it's to look at the images you have, and do this every time you go out and just critique them, don't beat yourself up about it, but just critique the images, excuse me, by being objective and saying, Okay, yeah, my exposures are off here, I'm underexposing a lot of the frame. Okay, how am I using how's my how am I using metering? Uh, can I use AE lock, for example, to get a better exposure or the kind of exposure that I I want to get? Do I know how to use AE lock? So, is that something I've just got to go out and practice? Just try it out, try a few different um scenes, different lighting, and see what happens. So that I would say is the most important thing to do. And if you do that consistently in your photography, you will find that you you do improve, you do get better, and you'll find it more satisfying. And then what also tends to happen is you start looking at other people's work that you really enjoy, and you realize you know how they got that result, and that means that you can replicate it, and then you can start doing that. And this um to me, this speaks a little bit of your style, whether or not you want to want a photography style, you've probably got one. But it means you can deliberately change that style. You can you might be inspired by somebody. You look at an image on Instagram, for example, or uh you go to an exhibition, uh, you go to a talk, and you you suddenly see something and and it just gives you ideas, and then you can go off and shoot them. And that to me is the real power of photography. And obviously, with things like wildlife photography, if you don't photograph wildlife very often, you you're you're likely to get shots that are not what you want. The shutter speed was wrong, the exposure was wrong, um, you weren't ready when it all happened. You know, all of these things happen. We all have those experiences, and the important thing is just learn from them. Uh you know, it's just to however you want to do that, you might want to take a notebook and jot things down. Some people do that, um, but it is really important, I think. Maybe even keep a mistakes log, because if you do that and you choose what you're going to work on, you keep it very specific, which is great because then it's focused. And then when you look back on it a few months later, you realize you can see just how much your photography is improved and in an objective way. So that is it. So, just for this part, first of all, just to recap what I spoke about, um, the first mistake was over-processing, over sharpening, all of those things. You know, no, just be go slow with your post-processing. Second mistake was culling too fast, um, and maybe getting rid of images that you know down the track you might realize weren't not as bad as you first thought. Number three was cropping too aggressively, so losing resolution and um also shooting uh the largest resolution you can in the first place and shoot raw. Mistake number four was ignoring colour and white balance consistency when you have a series of shots. So they need to look like a series, they need to look natural. And then the final mistake was not learning from the uh the shots that you missed. And then the just to recap the whole series. So, part one, hopefully you've listened to that, but if you haven't, part one, I spoke about five mistakes that ruin sharp photos. You end up with photos that aren't sharp. So I went through five of those. Part two, five mistakes that ruin your composition. So we were looking now more at the artistic side of photography. Um, last week we looked at five mistakes that you make before you shoot. So this is planning and um field craft, and then in this final episode, obviously, we've looked at what happens afterwards, and this kind of leads into what you want to do with your photographs, which you probably want to be thinking about before you go in the first place. So start with the end in mind. Okay, so I hope you found that useful. I hope you've um got some pointers from this episode and the the uh preceding episodes. Uh, you're very welcome to submit photographs to I have a general Facebook group, um, Graham Elliott Photography, if you use Facebook. Um, if there is anything that you would like me to uh cover, please drop me an email, Graham at GE.photography. And um finally, just please have a look at events and short courses that are going on. So I run short courses from time to time, not too many of them. And um, there are webinars uh pretty much every two weeks, although I am heading off to um uh Namibia soon, so there possibly won't be one then. And um finally, if you would really like to take a look at your photography, or if you're new to photography and you want to just start and get all of the basics nailed, then I do have an online course. It's called Discovering Uh DSLR and Mirrorless Photography, and it assumes no knowledge and it takes you through all of the building blocks that get you to um I hope the point where you are really confident in your photography. Okay, that's it from me. Please remember to like and subscribe. You're welcome to support the podcast. Good luck with your photography if you're going on a wildlife trip. I I really hope you enjoy it. Stay safe, and um, I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.