A lot of beginner photographers tend to make small mistakes, when they taking pictures. Mistakes like not composing the image properly, the image being out of focus, setting up tripod too early etc…This blog will be talking about 5 mistakes that beginner photographers can avoid.
1. Not focusing on composition
Many beginner photographers focus a lot on camera settings, camera lens, but forget that the light and composition are the most important thing in photography because that is what is going to make the viewer tell a story, it’s what matters at the end of the day right? And that is why composition is exceptionally essential. As a beginner photographer, you have to learn the composition techniques. So once you know all the composition techniques, try to incorporate them into images, you will see your pictures looking much better than before, just by changing the composition a bit. So next time make sure you spend some time in composing the images, to get better images.
2. Not adjusting the manual settings
Image by: https://goo.gl/images/Gf28Ag
Most of the time what happens is you adjust the manual settings for a particular light condition, and when you change the position of your camera, the light may not appear to be proper. So you have to make sure that you are always checking the light meter and continually adjust your manual settings to get appropriate exposure. Most of the beginners what they do is, they take the image, and if it’s darker, they try to fix at post-processing. If you want to get the best image quality, you have to make sure that you get a proper exposure from your camera. Then when you post-processing the images you will get better images.
3. Not exposing for the highlights
Images by: https://goo.gl/images/Rw9FRj
This is a mistake that most photographers have done when they are shooting something that already has high dynamic range. So if you have very bright highlights and very dark shadows and if you expose for the shadows, you will get biggest on the shadows, and the highlights will be blown out. And once the highlights are blown out, you can’t fix it in post-processing. So whenever you are exposing, make sure you’re exposing for highlights. Now most of the time, people might not understand what I mean by exposing for highlights. It merely means, points your camera towards the highlights or the sky, and then expose towards the sky and make sure the sky is exposed correctly, saying it’s not too dark nor too bright. And then you take the image with the original composition. So now the highlights are in focus, and the composition is excellent, then later you can process the shadows in post-processing.
4. Setting up the tripod too early
Image by: https://goo.gl/images/MASXGK
Most of the times what happens is, you go to a location, you take out the tripod, and you set it up, and then you lock the camera. Now you start taking images, but the thing is you have already locked the position of your camera, you have not framed it, and you did not compose it. And now when you need to change the camera position and the composition, it becomes difficult as it is already locked, and you don’t have the same level of flexibility. What you can do is go to the location and take the camera out, start shooting some images handheld with different framing and different composition. Then once you’re happy with the composition, you can then use the tripod. This is one of the useful tips.
5. Incorrect focusing modes
Image by: https://goo.gl/images/ZUQ2uw
Imagine you have a beautiful subject, a beautiful composition, but the subject is not in focus, what’s the point of taking the image right? And most of the time the subject is not in focus because of using incorrect focusing modes. There are different kinds of modes for a different situation. Think of a stationary subject, using a continuous mode focusing does not make sense, whereas the subject is moving it makes sense because you need to track the subject continuously. So you have to use different autofocusing modes to make sure that the subject is in focus all the time.
