Colin Smith

Why do we make such common mistakes over and over again? Either we’ve never been told why these issues are mistakes, or we simply forget when we’re in the excitement of taking photos.

The easiest way to prevent mistakes is to slow down, pay attention and make deliberate captures. No more spray and pray.

1. Wrong White Balance

Forgetting to set your white balance causes color casts on your photos. They may be too blue or too orange. Skin tones look awful.

We’re often reminded that you can easily fix this if you shoot in RAW, and that’s mostly true. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy.

The easiest way to fix white balance in post processing is if you have a photograph with a neutral grey color in the same light. Then all you have to do is grab the eyedropper tool in Lightroom or Photoshop boom – you fix your white balance.

Of course, not every photo has a perfect neutral grey color in it. So we click something that we think looks close to a neutral color and then that’s close enough.

Remedy:

It’s much easier if you just set the correct white balance before you start taking photos. That gets you in the range. If you want to be more specific, start carrying a grey card with you.

You can create a custom white balance in-camera using this grey card, or at least use it in post processing with the eyedropper. Just remember to set your white balance or take a photo of this grey card when you change lighting conditions.

2. Bad Horizon Lines

Nothing can ruin a travel, landscape or architecture photo faster than a horizon line that isn’t level.

It doesn’t matter whether you place your horizon high or low in the photo, but having a horizon that dips down to one side or another just screams amateur snapshot.

Remedy:

Your DSLR should have a mode to turn on an overlay inside the viewfinder. Most people use these for the Rule of Thirds. These lines give you a ruler to use for your horizon. Line it up. Make sure the horizon is level.

If you don’t have the guidelines enabled in your viewfinder, check your manual.

At the very least, use the top or bottom of your display or viewfinder to get the horizon level, and then lower the camera until you have the 

composition you want.

Can you fix this in post processing? Sure. Lightroom makes it very easy. However, that will also crop out part of your photo, so be prepared to lose some detail if you wait until after the shot to level your horizon.

3. Failing to Pay Attention to the Direction of Light

There are three aspects about light that photographers should understand:

• Quality
• Color
• Direction

You can’t always change these attributes, but you can pay attention to them.

The Direction of Light ought to be the easiest one to recognize. You can tell if it’s coming from the left or right, above or (oddly) below. You can see how the light falls on your subject and where it casts shadows based upon the direction of light.

So please, use that knowledge and observation to make better photos.

It’s annoying for your viewer when you take a photo of a person and there is more light on an ear or shoulder than on their face. You can fix this by moving your subject a few inches to take advantage of the light.

Maybe you’re photographing something besides a portrait and you can’t move your subject. That’s fine.

Can you walk around your subject to get to better light? Can you wait for a time when the light looks best on your subject? Hint: there’s a reason why so many photographers like to shoot at sunrise or sunset. They’re waiting for great light on their subject.

What happens when you can’t move your subject and the light never moves into a good position for your subject?

Then bring some off-camera flash or lighting.

If that can’t happen, then you don’t have a decent photo. Without good lighting on your subject, you don’t have a good photo.

Pay attention to the direction of light and you can create much better photos. Don’t think that you have to shoot everything head-on form the light. It’s fine to get creative with backlight, sidelight, and different angles.

If you aren’t sure what angles look great, start studying photos that you like. Pay attention to where the source of light is relative to the subject. You’ll develop a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

4. Blurry Subjects or Poor Focus

Sometimes, you’re in a hurry and you don’t quite nail the focus. Maybe you’re shooting an event and there isn’t a chance to do it over. You got a shot, but the focus isn’t sharp.

What do you do?

Many people think they can fix it later in post processing with some extra sharpening. You know what that does?

It creates a blurry photo with some crunchy bits around the edges. In other words, it sucks.

Despite what you see on TV, you cannot add detail to a photograph after you’ve taken the shot. You can remove it, such as by adding blur. You just can’t make it in-focus.

Sharpening is a process that adds blacks to the edges to provide more contrast, a pleasing effect that we think makes photos look sharper. The problem is that it only works if those edges are clear and in focus when you capture the photo.

Adding blacks, or sharpening, a blurry photo just makes it look crunchy. There’s no saving it. Throw it away.

In some cases, you may be able to fix this while you’re still taking photos. Trying to zoom in to a photo on the LCD screen of your camera is often misleading.

If you can’t be sure while you’re looking at your subject on the LCD, take another photo. And then another one. Take a few. Your odds of getting a usable photo increase and your photography mistakes decrease when you have more choices. Check your focus with each shot.

As for those fleeting moments, you either catch them or you don’t. If you’re trying to photograph a breaching whale and you didn’t get the focus, then you don’t have a shot. Delete it and try again, or pretend you never got anything in the first place.

5. Busy Backgrounds

There are three elements you can combine to make a beautiful photograph:

• Background
• Light
• Subject

Screw up any of those and you may have a snapshot, but you don’t have a photo that makes you proud.

The most common thing to screw up is the background. So, pay attention to your backgrounds and surroundings.

Distracting elements will draw the viewer’s eye away from the subject. You want to eliminate distractions and distilled your photo down to a little as possible. When there’s nothing left to remove, then you can take your shot.

Sometimes the easiest way to eliminate a distraction is to move. Change your position. Re-compose the photo. A few inches can provide surprising results.

Get rid of the distractions in the background. Minimalism is your friend to avoid photography mistakes.

6. Bad Cropping

Bad cropping happens when you cut off part of your subject or an element in your photo at an awkward angle.

Let me give you an example. If you’re going to take a full length portrait, don’t cut off your subject’s feet.

It just looks odd to crop someone at the ankles.

If you just can’t fit in the feet, then crop the person mid-thigh. Similarly, don’t crop off a hand at the wrist, or some other point that just looks awkward.

If you shoot a head and a neck, then give some more room and include the shoulders. A head and neck without a body is pretty creepy to me.

Not sure where to crop? Do your research and look at other photos and portraits. You’ll see what you like and what just seems awkward. The key here is to pay attention to the norms and avoid the awkward stuff.

What if you aren’t photographing a portrait?

The same rules still apply. A shot of a building just above the ground level is on the odd side, but you can get away with shooting up at a skyscraper from a low angle.

We have expectations of things that go together. Buildings don’t float, so we expect to see a sidewalk or something where you step inside. On the other hand, it’s not unusual to look up at a skyscraper without worrying that you can’t see the ground.

Include the things that you take for granted.

7. Poor Composition

Most of us see things in 3D, but our camera can’t do that. So we have to use composition to add a sense of depth. Fake 3D.

The way you do this is to have elements in the foreground, middle and background. You don’t have to go overboard for depth. It can be quite simple, as in this photo below.

The table and reflection is my foreground. A wonderful Cuban woman who invited us into her home is the subject in the middle, and her kitchen appliances and utensils along the wall make up a background.

Simple and effective. The photo tells you who she is and delivers a sense of depth in a small space. She’s in a space where she belongs.

The people are going to either be minuscule foreground elements in front of a great photo of a statue, or the statue won’t be recognizable in the shot.

They’re too close together to capture on an iPhone.

Sometimes showing depth means adding space. Large background objects need to be far away from your subjects, who are closer to your camera. Trying to compress both subject and large background together is a recipe for disaster.

Remember, your background is there to support your subject, not dominate it.

8. Bad Exposure

Exposure can be a matter of taste or style. Some images are supposed to be dark and others bright. Then there are times when you just screw up your exposure.

Don’t make a mistake and call it art.

Modern DSLRs have very good light meters inside these days. Trusting them to get a correct exposure generally works, and then it’s easy to tweak the exposure to your taste.

Poor exposure happens whether you use an automatic mode or manual exposure adjustment. It’s usually because you aren’t paying attention to the meter indicator built into your viewfinder.

Let’s say that you’re shooting in manual mode and you have your exposure just right for your location. Then there’s a change in the light, but you’re distracted by your subject or something else. Basically, you aren’t paying attention to your meter.

Maybe a cloud rolls over, or you move from outside to inside. Something changes the light and you keep on clicking.

Bad exposure.

OK, so you think the better way to go is with Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority. Set it and forget it.

Not always. Yes, you get more range using these modes, but you also open up other potential for exposure issues. Now you’re no longer using a consistent exposure from one shot to the next. Changing your metering by moving from a face to a dark shirt will change your exposure.

In other cases, you could move into different light that is beyond the range of the automatic exposure triangle. Maybe you need more or less ISO, or a change in shutter speed.

I’m not suggesting that there is a perfect mode. You just have to watch the meter reading to make sure you’re not allowing your exposure to go wonky.

As with focus, there are some things you can recover in post processing and some things you can’t. When your exposure is so bad that you lose detail in the highlights or shadows, you’re not going to magically get it back. You can do a lot these days with a RAW photo to reduce highlights and raise shadows, but there are limits.

9. Boring Subject

Let me ask you a question.

Have you ever seen a photo of a person on vacation holding an object up to the camera because they thought it was interesting? If so, did you think it was an interesting photo?

Of course not. That’s because there is nothing interesting about a person standing there holding a vase or a fish. Maybe the item was interesting to them and they wanted a snapshot memory, but it’s a crappy photo because it means nothing to anyone else.

On the other hand, let’s say the object actually is interesting in it’s environment. Would you rather see the dead fish in someone’s hands, or a shot of it as they’re reeling in the fish and it breaks the waterline? How about a shot of the person reeling in the fish, the rod bent into a curve while your subject has an expression of excitement on her face?

Now it’s no longer a boring subject.

Still photos of dead fish aren’t interesting, but an action shot grabs you and brings you into the photo. Action, motion and expression add interest to your photos. Static objects mostly just seem boring. Especially if they aren’t even visually appealing static objects.

If you want to avoid boring photos, work on adding some emotion, action or sense of character into your subjects.

10. Failing to use Post Processing Software

Do you have a friend who gets excited showing you a photograph that’s “straight out of the camera?”

If they’re JPEG, then your camera applied some post processing presets to tweak the colors and sharpen the images.

If they’re RAW, then it’s up to you to apply those post processing tweaks and sharpening. RAW isn’t a photograph. It’s a database that’s used to generate an image. You can manipulate it in a lot of ways, but the default result is flat, boring and needs sharpening.

All RAW images need sharpening. If you do nothing else, sharpen your RAW photos before you share them.

As for color tweaks, that depends upon your taste. You can use Lightroom or Photoshop.

If you’re sharing or printing RAW photos without post processing, then you’re not showing your photos at their best. This is one of those photography mistakes you can eliminate with a few seconds in Lightroom or other post processing programs.

Avoiding Photography Mistakes Isn’t Difficult

I’ll say it again, I’ve made every mistake on this list and plenty more. These mistakes happen when you aren’t paying attention to some basic details.

The easiest way to avoid these 10 photography mistakes is to slow down. Take your time. Craft your shot.