Photography 101 - Top 6 Beginner's Mistakes in Photography (Patreon)

Photography is one of those things that is simple to pick up, but difficult to master. Here are the top 10 mistakes I see beginner's make.

Have a subject

It's really common in photography critique threads, forums, and servers that people will upload a photo they are relatively proud of that is of...nothing. There is no obvious object or landscape they were taking a photo of, it is more just a bunch of stuff in the frame rather than a defined subject. Before you take your photo, know what your subject is and decide what you want to cut out of your photo to make your subject shine. Remember the key to great photography is often "less is more."

Here are a couple of amateur photos that demonstrate what I mean

With this image, if the subject was meant to be the wooden walkway, it's not framed in an interesting way. It's just smack dab in the middle of the frame with no leading lines, interesting aspects, or well much at all going on. I think very likely if the camera had just been moved up and to the right, this could have potentially been a decent shot. It's a walkway, show us where it leads.

Here is an example where the frame is just overloaded with "things." The photographer spent a lot of time tweaking the lighting and feel of this photo, but no amount of editing, cropping, or tweaking of this image is going to make it interesting. It's far too zoomed in and the frame is just filled with random objects. It's a photo equivalent of a junk drawer.

Focus on the right spot

Too often I see people who know what they want their subject to be, but they don't focus the photo correctly. Don't get me wrong, they understand the mechanics of how to focus their camera. But they choose the wrong focal point on the subject. When it comes to humans or animals, most often you will want to focus on the eyeball; preferably the one closest to you. This is of course not an absolute 100% rule, but it's the kind of rule you need to learn before breaking it. I've always felt the phrase "Rules are made to be broken" would be better suited as "Rules should be broken, once they are fully understood." 

If you are shooting landscapes, buildings, or street photography, go back to the previous mistake and start from there. What is your subject? If it is a particular building out of a lot of buildings, focus on that. If it is a part of a building you would like to highlight, well, the answer becomes obvious. Then you need to ask yourself, do you want the item you focus on to be entirely in focus, or just partially. Make sure you select a proper aperture/focal length combo to get the proper range of your depth of field. (See my lesson on Depth of Field by clicking the Photography 101 tag at the bottom)

Here is a perfect example of someone who understands how to focus on their camera, but does not know where to focus. They decided they want the plant in focus, with the building as the background (proper subject selection.) Then they failed to nail the focus point by focusing on the tip of the stem, rather than the pink flowers themselves. This is most likely a camera that was placed in complete wide autofocus mode, where the camera selected the item to put into focus and not the user. Often, camera's will select the point closest to the user when determining the focal point. This is why with a lot of amateur portraits, the tips of people's noses will be in focus rather than the subject's eye.

No dutch angles!

This is a particular pet peeve of mine, and a mistake I made very often as a novice. When you are shooting, stick to either landscape or portrait mode. Turning your camera at any angle in between these two is called a "dutch angle" and is a guaranteed way to make your images look absolutely amateur. Now of course this falls into the category of rules that can be broken. But a dutch angle very rarely looks professional. The most often purposeful use of dutch angles is when you would like to be off-putting. So strange horror and macabre work is often well suited for the dutch angle...but even then ONLY if you know what you are doing, and are doing so intentionally. 

The main reason I often wound up shooting dutch angles so often, was because I wanted to fit my subject in frame, without making them too small. Well let me tell you now you are far better off just backing up and fitting them in properly. Resolution on images these days is more than enough that you aren't losing out on any major details by keeping it squared up.

Here are a couple of dutch angle amateur shots. I mean I honestly don't feel I need to say much about them, it just looks like someone who doesn't know how to hold a camera level, rather than an intentional artistic choice.

Shooting in JPEG

It's extremely common for us as humans to want to work with what we understand. Learning new things is stress inducing and taxing on our mental state. But even if you dont' want to learn how to use your camera in manual mode, you are doing yourself a huge dis-service by sticking to JPEG images. You've spent all of this money on a camera that has the capability to shoot RAW files, and you aren't even going to use them? At that point, you may as well stick to a phone because those cameras will shoot JPEG files just as well. 

The power of RAW files is immediately clear once you get a chance to try them in a program suited to edit them, such as lightroom. You can take a photo that looks near pitch black, and recover it to perfect beauty. You can make colors more vibrant, and selectively edit those colors in ways you never thought possible. RAW files are a direct uncompressed translation of what the camera itself sees. This gives you a greater degree of flexibility with your images that you literally would not believe if you have not seen it before. It's similar to taking a photo of a screen vs. taking a screenshot. One is high resolution and high quality, while the other looks like it came from a grandmother who doesn't understand technology.

Here is a shot of mine taken in RAW, it was taken intentionally dark so that I would be able to retain the sky detail. If this image had been exposed for the subject then the sky would be pure white instead of having hints of blue and orange. Without this being taken in RAW, I would have never been able to count on recovering the data of Hannah G, and she would have remained a black blob.

Moving yourself instead of your subject

This is a little more prevalent in studio situations than natural light scenarios. But it definitely still applies to both. As humans, we often dislike telling others what to do. It feels rude and goes against everything we were taught growing up (for most of us at least.) But this discomfort is something that is absolutely necessary when shooting portraits. 

There are far too many times I have had people come to my studio and I see them bobbing and weaving left and right to get different angles on the model. Then they take their images back and while reviewing they find that they've lost the solid backdrop and ruined the image entirely. The same can happen when shooting outdoors. There is often a lot of crap out in the world, there are few places mankind has not touched. So when you find that perfect background setting, it's vital that you keep your camera lined up so you don't wind up shooting that highway nearby instead of the whimsical forest setting you've spent so long searching for. 

Don't be afraid to ask your model to rotate, to walk left or right, or do whatever it is you need to get the shot. As long as it's safe of course. The thing is, people don't mind, they came to be put in front of a camera and be directed. While you have a LOT going on that you are worried about such as your settings, framing, lighting, etc. They are sitting there with literally nothing to do and it can get quite boring if they aren't being directed in any way. Many of the people I work with have told me about their negative experiences with other photographers, and I can confidently say the number one complaint I hear is "They didn't tell me to do anything, they just kinda silently stood there taking photos and I had no idea what they wanted." 

Spending too much time editing

Finally, the absolute largest mistake of all. I was originally going to write an entire photography 101 on this alone, but I had some other mistakes come to mind while working and decided to make it into a list. Please if you read nothing else READ THIS. 

So so so so soooooooooooo many photographers will take 100 images of a person, and then spend the next 20-40 hours editing the photos to make them perfect. They want to get that magazine quality shot and show off their incredible editing skills to the world. In the end they come out with 2-5 beautiful shots to return to the model, they post on instagram and well...that's that. 

The problems with this method are gigantic, and often the cause of many photography careers to end before they've even started. Let's take a look at the negative drawbacks of working this way:

1. The model is disappointed - they spent at minimum an hour with you, and likely more. They know you shot around 100+ frames, becuase you showed them the back of your camera from excitement and they got excited too. You wouldn't believe the number of people that tell me "well I know we took some really great shots, but I never got any of those back." You might get to work with this model again, but I wouldn't count on it.
2. You've wasted your time. Do you have any idea how long someone looks at an image when it's posted on social media? The length of time isn't even measured in seconds, we are talking miliseconds.
3. Your social media updates will be slow to the point of being non-existant. In today's world where social media is the primary way to advertise your services for free, you need to be able to post frequently and post a lot. Having 2-5 images after a week of working on them simply isn't enough output to do anything with.
4. Social media compression will ruin all of your hard work. Did you get every blemish and pimple off the face of your model? Well, you can say goodbye to that as everything you've done is now a blurry set of compressed pixels that are being viewed on a mobile device in most cases.

Here's the key. Work towards the career you are aiming for. It's much like dressing for the job you want. Do you want to be a portrait photographer? Great, get out there, shoot 100 frames, make sure the colors and lighting are good on all of them and get them back to the model. People love photos of themselves, don't be afraid to send back the blinks.

Want to be a wedding photographer? Don't you dare think about sending back 5 photos to a wedding. Those numbers need to be in the hundreds. Learn to edit quickly and efficiently, and don't worry about removing something from every frame unless it is just the absolute worst thing that you HAVE to get rid of. The client almost never will notice as they are happy looking at themselves. 

Do you want to be a commercial photographer? You know, the kind that has extremely heavily edited images. Great, they have people for that. If you are going for a job that requires you to have a camera in your hands, you will not be doing the editing to the level that professional retouchers do. Professional retouchers almost never go out and shoot for the job. If they are picking up a camera it is likely because it's their hobby outside of work.

One more time for those in the back. FOCUS ON PRODUCING IMAGES, YOUR JOB IS TO PROVIDE VARIETY AND CHOICE. 

One last scenario, you have a client who is the most detail oriented person who absolutely wants you to remove every single pixel that is out of place on an image. Wonderful, charge them for that service, and charge heavily. Either source the work out to professional retouchers (they are a dime a dozen and will spam message you on modelmayhem.) Or if you are going to do the work yourself, make damn sure it's worth your time. Charge an hourly rate, and make it higher than you feel comfortable. This is the equivalent of overtime for photographers, it is not within the scope of their work to do professional level commercial edits that you would see in a magazine.

Finally, here is an example I'm ashamed to admit from my own past. Out of these photos, I took 213 frames. I produced 2 images.

Needless to say, the model was none too pleased, and I am willing to bet I would have lingerie photos featuring her if I had just handled this properly back in the day. Of course I kept all of the original's, so I've been able to go back and edit them since. But this model has moved across the country and well, the opportunity is simply gone.