I love my D_SLR. It’s so big and black everyone knows I must be a professional photographer! My camera actually does give me a lot of scope for the range of work I do, but truth be told, there are people with much less professional equipment who take photographs that are as good as mine and (dare I admit it?) better.
Pro cameras are bulky and expensive mainly because they're tougher. They have to stand up to weather and environmental conditions that would keep most people indoors, and do it with absolute reliability, exposure after exposure. They also have to produce files or negatives capable of yielding much larger prints of a quality than most amateur photographers just don’t need.
Compact and "amateur" SLR cameras produce great images and some of my best selling and most requested pictures were taken with these cameras, simply because I was able to carry one with me when it wasn’t practical to take one of my “big guns”.
It comes down to this: modern cameras, in fact most cameras produced in the last 50 years, are perfectly satisfactory tools to capture images of great quality. But not one of them is clever enough to know what images to capture. That is up to you.
Which brings me to a sad admission: when a photograph doesn’t turn out as I expect or intend, its generally not the fault of my equipment. It is usually not even a technical error on my part. It is more likely that I went wrong with what I included in the picture, or poor framing, or thoughtless composition with badly arranged elements, or maybe bad lighting that I could have avoided or improved.
Well, my ego is large enough to let me believe that if I can blunder this way, so can you! So here is my list of the common mistakes people like me make that maybe you make, too, together with what I really should have done, so that maybe you can avoid my bludners (sic).
Dumb Mistake 1: I Didn’t Isolate the Subject - It is easy to see the potential in a scene and concentrate so hard on it that you miss all the other distracting things in the picture. The human mind is a great abstracter, and it has a lot to work with: the real world is 3 dimensional, it has sound and movement and smells.
None of these clues appears in a 2 dimensional photo. When the final image is crowded with objects and colours that draw the eye away from the message you were trying to convey, that’s the photographer’s fault: They left too much in!
In Photography, less is usually more. You have to decide what exactly makes this subject interesting enough to record, then isolate just the elements that explain that. Do not include too much in the scene or your viewer will be left wondering why you bothered taking the photo and why they should be bothered looking at it anyway.
Dumb Mistake 2: I Gave Up Too Soon - An hour hanging around in the rain hoping for the clouds to part and the sun to illuminate the Ibis nesting trees behind Lake Gillawarna was enough for me. I set off for the other side of the shrubland to see if I could get close enough to the goslings in their nests without upsetting the adult swans. I’ve got hundreds of swan photos, not so many of Ibis hatchlings. Well, now I’ve got a dozen more swans, but my wife has the pictures I really wanted. She had the patience to wait for the sun to break through!
What if it hadn’t happened? Neither one of us would have been any worse off.
Dumb Mistake 3: I Chimp too much - You don’t know what “Chimping” is? It’s checking out every picture you take on the digital camera screen like a bunch of monkeys. We couldn’t do it with film, and it is a real trap for digital photographers. Instant feedback!
That can’t be bad, can it? It is if your attitude is that the best feature of your digital cameras is that you can delete pictures you don't like. Sure, some photos are obviously duds, but nobody can really judge the quality of until they see it in on a decent size screen. I won’t say you should never delete a picture in the field, but it should definitely be the exception, not the rule. I don’t say you should never check your pictures on the little screen, but you should never make your final decisions based on what you see, or take more than a moment to do it..
Those little screens are not calibrated: bright sun makes them tragically inaccurate and in dull light they become over-bright. The state of your battery affects them, too. You can always delete the pictures at home. Consider this: you are going to miss a lot of opportunities if you spend any unnecessary time with your camera in “Review” Mode, head down away from the action; you are also going to burn up a lot more batteries.
Memory cards are cheap. Carry a spare or two and save your chimping for later.
Dumb Mistake 4: I Rely too much on my editing skills - I admit it: I enjoy a long session in front of the computer, working on my pictures. And sometimes I think, as I press the shutter button, “I can fix that in PaintshopPro when I get home”. That’s right...I know the horizon is crooked, or that the shot is a 1/2 stop overexposed, or that I should have used a larger aperture to limit depth of field. But instead of making a second exposure, I move on to something else.
There are so many things wrong with this attitude. Not the least is that it isn’t true: even if I could fix all my problems with Photoshop or PaintshopPro or any other package I would have to spend a lot more than the few seconds it would have cost me to take another picture.
If you realise that your photo isn’t right and you have the chance, take another one. Keep the original too. Someone might have their eyes closed in the new one or the first shot might have that “something extra” that the second doesn’t. Then you really have something to work on in you editor: 2 images to merge, perhaps?
Dumb Mistake 5: I find a good vantage point and stay there - That’s a big mistake. Sometimes there isn’t really a choice, like at a.... hmmm! Can’t really think of a good example. Maybe if your hedged in by a crowd, or can’t get out of your car because you are in a flood, or you are shooting a robbery in progress and don’t want the crims to spot you...
In any other situation, avoid getting locked down. Move around; change your point of view. If you can’t walk about for some reason, kneel or crouch down, hold your camera above your head, move left, right, and forward and use your zoom.
Use your viewfinder as a scanner, panning around the scene. Do the opposite - put the camera down and look around so you don’t miss what is going on outside the frame of the viewfinder.
Dumb Mistake 6: I know where the shot is - Well, I am sure I know where one shot is: probably the most obvious photo. I wonder how many times I have walked off, not knowing I had missed the better shot. So, don’t point the camera through the car window, or just get out of the car and take the photo. Take your time to evaluate the scene.
A photographer doesn’t just find a interesting subject and just snap away, without thought to composition. Well, that’s what an amateur photographer might do. By all means, take the obvious photo, but with that one on the card, ask the question, “why is this place/thing/person different?” If it is just because I haven’t been here before (it’s exotic), What would make it interesting to a local? Making the familiar interesting is not just about seeing the interesting shot, but understanding why and showing that aspect in a compelling way.
Maybe the first picture will still be the one you prefer, but odds are it will be just like anyone else’s photo taken under similar circumstances. A good picture says something about the subject, but it also bears the stamp of the photographer. Let you work say something about you.
Dumb Mistake 7: I break the rules - I can’t recall which photographer said "Rules don't matter a whit if the subject is truly interesting". It’s a pretty easy con to fall for.
We love to say we are not rule driven and that rules are meant to be broken. The problem is that the subject only becomes really interesting in the hands of a good photographer. There are exceptions: a photo of a famous person in an unexpected situation might be interesting. But break too many rules (get close, fill the frame, watch for obstructions, don’t shoot into the light etc) and no one will know who the person is or what they are doing.
The “rules” are not there to tell you what you are allowed to do with your camera. They are a distillation of what people have discovered from looking at centuries of beautiful pictures (millions of recent pictures and hundreds of thousands of ancient works) - those we truly admire, from every culture, have certain things in common; the rules came after the pictures were acknowledged to be great.
If you want to see how good, novel and creative photography uses the rules, head off to some galleries or a library. Do not just look at photos though. Look at paintings, etchings and drawings, too. The “rules” are the same.
Dumb Mistake 8: I fiddle around with my camera settings - What I should do is take the shot. Despite all I have said so far, nothing matters if you don't get the shot. If you get too obsessed with the details and miss the moment because they were fussing with the controls, or wandering about looking for the best vantage point, then why were they there? Be prepared and get the shot in the bag. Then take the time to explore your subject.
Dumb Mistake 9: Sometimes I wait for the perfect image - It’s a bit like fiddling with the camera controls instead of getting the shot. Worse, because I could get a shot in the bag. Maybe it is an attitude left over from shooting film: don’t waste a precious (expensive) frame, which is a bit silly. Film in the camera isn’t worth anything!
Don't hold back waiting for the perfect picture. Consider that you're on your way to shoot something when a photo op presents itself. It isn’t framed quite right, the sun’s too high in the sky or you haven’t got the tele lens on. If that’s the way it is, live with it! Get the best shot you can and move on to what you were doing in the first place. What have you lost?. You aren’t wasting anything; you are investing in possibilities and if you are working in digital, you are not even using up film.
If the shot turns out you are well in front. If not you have a record of something worth going back to photograph when you are better prepared, something you may otherwise not recall! I admit to being pleasantly surprised on more than one occasion by these chance encounters.
Dumb Mistake 10: I stand tall - I’m old. Bending down is creaky work, laying on damp grass hazardous. Photographically, so is only shooting from eye level while standing up. The novel perspective you get from lying on your stomach is a great bonus to a photographer. A little dog can dominate the scene, dwarfing his mistress. A flower seen from below is a revelation. Nor should you neglect gaining a higher vantage point. Ladders should be sold in photography stores as camera accessories, but if you don’t have one in your gadget bag, you can climb a tree or stand on the door sill of your
You will soon learn to appreciate the way an unusual angle or novel point of view makes you images more dynamic and you a more interesting photographer..
Dumb Mistake 11: I avoid people in my landscapes - I don't mean in my holiday or family snapshots and I try to make them something worth keeping, too. I tend to wait for people to leave the picture, even when they belong there.
I like the empty land; the sense of a natural world without the visible hand of Man. That is not the only way to see the land and, despite my preference, there are valid reasons to include people in photographs. Having someone looking into a scene is a very natural way to lead the viewer’s eye into the landscape; people provide scale and meaning that mountains, trees or even buildings cannot. Only with a human form in the scene can a viewer truly grasp the size of and awesome scale of the natural world - or the human.
Dumb Mistake 12: I forget that a zoom lens only changes image size - It doesn’t alter perspective and that means I sometimes need to move closer or further away to get the picture I really want. When the mountains are dwarfed by the size of the people in the scene, I need to move as far back as possible and zoom in until the people are the right size and in proportion to the mountain will will now seem bigger.
That works anywhere a foreground and a background need to be balanced; move away from the foreground and zoom in to accentuate the background much more and move into the scene and zoom back to accentuate the foreground. The extreme form of this manoeuvre is to shoot with a wide-angle lens...the background look tiny and everything seems spread apart, while a telephoto makes things both larger and compressed together.
Well, those are some of the mistakes I make...I hope you can avoid them.
