Taking great photos is undoubtedly a hard work; hence, there are chances of you making mistakes. You overcome those and you get a picture perfect. This goes on as a learning process. You make new mistakes & learn from them. I’m into professional photography since past 8 years and trust me, I am learning too. Most mistakes that photographers make are the same trap that a each photographer falls into. Each professional has been there as a process of developing own skill set.
Here are the 5 most common photography mistakes that amateur photographers make –
1. Using Auto-Mode
Photography is an art and science both. One needs to have a creative eye to visualize a photograph & then needs to know the science behind freezing that frame.
Two images of the same subject can be captured in completely different ways. That’s the magic you can create using Manual Mode. Experimenting with Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO is the basic manual mode setting that one can explore. Sadly, the same is ignored.
Photography in auto-mode simply means, letting your camera decide for you. Whereas, being a photographer behind the camera, you should be the decision maker and use your camera to put your imagination into reality.
Conclusion being, to avoid this very primary mistake, the first thing you need to do is shift from Auto-Mode to Manual-Mode, take control over your settings and be the decision maker.
2. Not Visualizing The Shot Before You Click
When you are learning photography, you definitely tend to do mistakes thus resulting into never getting the shot right the very first time. You might miss out of a few details, not get the perfect composition or frame.
In order to avoid this, make sure that you visualize your shot before you make that CLICK. Secondly, work on the shot that you visualized. Step ahead, forward or sideways to adjust the frame. Check on the angles that would suit the best for the subject & the mood, think on the settings that would be required to take the shot that you visualized. Putting in a bit more time and effort and trying several options, you will definitely get a much better image than the one you shot first. Photography is all about patience.
3. Leaving Your Comfort Zone
Once you get a hang on certain type of skill set, you tend to be ignorant upon trying to improve. Once you find something that works for you, it becomes hard to motivate yourself to experiment and try new things. You tend to get the Landscape Photography Phase, Portrait Phase, Wildlife Phase and so on.
It’s human nature that makes one lose interest once you are done trying a particular thing several times. That only makes your photographs look reliably good but they lack creativity.
This is the time when you need to leave your comfort zone and try out something different with the same genre. That’s where you can get creative. That’s when you can break rules to get out-of-the-box images using your pre-existing photography skills.
4. Getting Too Creative
Talking about capturing out-of-the-box images, one needs to be careful of not going over-board and being too creative to mess up the image terribly. Yes, this does happen, mostly during post-processing of the images.
Examples can be – Using High Dynamic Range technique unnecessarily & everywhere, selective desaturation except for single color, trying to over-recompose images in editing tool, using picture style setting on camera to over-saturate and over-sharpen photographs, loosing focus in the name of ‘artistic look’, excessive background blurring. If you are doing any of these, I must say, it is not bad to explore around these techniques, but you should also know where to stop.
It is a good idea to show your photos to friends and family and ask them for their genuine review. This 3rd party analysis can definitely give you the required corrective course.
These mistakes mostly happen when photographers start exploring the photo-editing software and realize how drastically different their captures look with the post-processing techniques. And trust me, this is one-of-the-hardest to get over.
5. Not Evaluating Your Work
It’s impossible to improve if you just keep on capturing images & do not evaluate them. You need to be your own critic for the past captures. Study the images you captured in past, evaluate as to what worked and what didn’t. That is how you can create scope for improving upon your future captures. It’s fine to make new mistakes, but do not repeat the old ones, just learn from them.
Evaluating your old work with a fresh eye would definitely bring in a new perspective and vision to your photography. And mind you, it’s absolutely ok to be embarrassed to see some of your old shots that you thought were great. But the best part is the soon you start evaluating your photographs on timely basis and try to improve; the earlier you see yourself improve and progress.
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