Photography is an art. Capturing those awesome moments and presenting them in a pleasing and stunning manner is really an art; not an easy one. May be it will be easier if you practice more and become an expert.
But still, it doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie photographer or a professional photographer, you’re always bound to make mistakes – and, sometimes, really silly ones.
In this post I am going to talk about some of those mistakes and ways to avoid them. Let’s begin…
Lighting
This is where most photos slip badly in one way or the other. Poor lighting – yes, it need not be just dim lighting but it can be anything from glare, over lighting, wrong direction of lighting to darkness.
It is very important that you need to have control over the amount of light that enters the camera lens. If there is too much light this can lead to glare in the picture. Such a situation can arise if you stand just opposite to a bright light source (say, for instance, the sun) and hold your camera.
At the same time if the surrounding is such that there is not enough light, you have to make arrangements for lighting alternates – you can use your camera’s night mode for shooting or arrange for powerful flash that will serve the purpose.
In general it is good to hold the camera off from the light source so that the subject is facing the light source and not the camera.
Wrong Zoom
No I am not talking about taking blurry pictures, even though that is also part of the zooming mistake. But what I am talking about here is zooming or focusing the wrong element in your view.
Say for instance you have a bird at flight that catches a fish in the river. You also have a bird sitting on the tree just at the shore of the river.
You may choose to focus any one of those birds for your shot. But having both of them in the view and focusing on the bird at flight might give you undesirable results.
This is because one bird is in motion and the other is stationary. Having both of them in the frame and focusing on the moving bird will impact the picture quality.
At the same time, if you capture these two birds separately at different shots you can focus both the birds in the respective shots.
Distance
The distance from the camera to the subject plays a major role in deciding the quality of the shot. However, this fact is not very well known by most photographers. Your lens can only work so far and to only up to a certain quality.
It is therefore very important that you go reasonably close to the subject, unless you are taking a shot of a big landscape or a scenery.
If the focus of your shot is a particular subject, you must get closer enough to it to get a clear and a good shot of the subject. Of course you can cover as much background as you can, but do not compromise on the clarity of the subject of focus for the sake of background.
Distractions
A photo can be made pretty or ugly depending on what you let inside the view frame. When you are ready to press that “Shoot” button, scan the view frame very carefully to look for any misleading elements or ugly elements that don’t fit in the picture.
Make the picture as much professional as possible by eliminating those little things that badly affect the “theme” of your shot. Even if you are capturing your friends at a party, make sure you leave off the dirty plates, torn tissues and broken wine bottles from the view.
Every single detail you leave out of the frame or allow inside the frame will contribute to the clarity, and quality of your shot.
What are the mistakes you make? And how do you take care to avoid them?
Distractions is probably my biggest pet peeve. I don’t want anything taking away from the photograph that I am taking.