Once you pick up a bad photography habit, it can be hard to break. But which are the ones you really should try and crack before they get in the way of your enjoyment of picture-taking and the quality of the photos you produce? We’ve had some great suggestions from our followers on Twitter and Facebook, including overprocessing images, not checking the histogram and – one of our favourites – not getting up early enough to catch the best light at sunrise. Here are our top 5 bad habits though – let us know if they ring any bells…
1. Not checking battery power or memory card space
We’ve all been guilty of this at some point. Haven’t we? Come on… OK, maybe it is just us. But it’s easy to be complacent when it comes to ensuring there’s enough juice to power your camera. If you’re shooting in cold temperatures, relying on autofocus and image stabilization, using a built-in flash and reviewing shots then you increase the drain on the battery. Buy some peace of mind and buy a spare battery that you can keep charged up. Do the same with a memory card too – get into the habit of copying images across to your computer each day. The last thing you want to be doing is deleting images when you’re on a shoot.
2. Not resetting exposure compensation
As you know, very dark or very bright scenes or subjects can lead to a camera’s exposure meter overexposing or underexposing a picture, but dialling in exposure compensation can rectify this. What can be an endless source of frustration though, is forgetting to reset the compensation once you’ve finished shooting. Without doing so, chances are you’ll move to another shooting situation and then dial in any required exposure compensation on top of the previous adjustment, and the results can be hideously over- or underexposed…
3. Relying on RAW
Shooting RAW files offers more editing headroom; you give yourself maximum flexibility and quality control when you’re working on your pictures in software like Photoshop and Lightroom. It’s easy to see RAW as a bit of a safety net because you can change some key parameters like white balance, picture styles and even (to a limited extent) exposure as if you were adjusting them in-camera. But if you don’t attempt to try and get things right in-camera, you’re just adding to the time you’ll spend editing your pictures.
For instance, while you may be able to pull back detail in the shadows of an underexposed image, you’re likely to increase the amount of image noise as you do so. Why give yourself a harder job and reduce the picture quality you’re trying to preserve by shooting RAW in the first place?
4. Not being aware of the shutter speed
Aperture Priority is a default shooting mode for many photographers, as it offers control over the depth of field in an image. However, it’s easy to lose track of the shutter speed being selected by the camera as you concentrate on getting the shot. If you shoot at low ISO settings, you can often end up with a shot that at best lacks bite and sharpness – and at worst is completely blurred – if the shutter speeds becomes too slow to freeze subject movement or the effects of camera shake.
5. Rushing to get the shot
We’re not suggesting that every shot needs to be pondered over – and when you need to react to a fast-moving situation, you often don’t have a lot of time to think. But we know we’ve rushed to grab shots which we didn’t really need to rush to shoot, and ended up with disappointing results. It’s usually because we missed a distracting feature in the background, rather than an extreme exposure foul-up, but that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.
