Stephen Walton Photography Workshops

When you’ve been a photographer for a long time I think it’s important to pass on the experience to other photographers. You’re doing the next-generation service and it may save others time discovering they’re making fatal or repetitive errors.

Here is my Top 5 sins that photographers make (which are easily fixable).

1. Relying on the LCD

There’s never been anything that’s 3 inches wide and has ever been impressive – or so I hear. Which includes your camera’s LCD screen. It’s there for solely for reference, not as a definitive guide to the final photo.

Don’t take the image on the screen as gospel, there’s so much you’re not truly seeing. You won’t see the finer details (maybe unless you’re zooming in all the time, but who does that right?). You won’t be fully able to gauge sharpness and information in the shadows.

Instead rely on other on-screen readouts such as the exposure metering gauge, histogram, and peaking modes to tell you if your image is within the tonal range.

2. Never Changing Focus / Metering Modes

I’ll put my hand up and admit I always used to leave it in spot focus mode for everything. I’d simply focus in the middle and then recompose and while it’s not a sin to do that some images require a different setting.

Camera companies wouldn’t create other focus or exposure metering modes if they weren’t needed (or would they? No, I’m fairly confident they wouldn’t). Therefore there must be situations when you’ll need a different exposure mode or focus setting.

Get familiar with them and use them appropriately. It’ll seriously make your photography must consistent.

3. Not Thinking of Why You’re Taking the Shot

I’m all for taking pictures whenever, wherever but still remember why you’re doing it.

Even if it’s just a nice sunset you’re shooting remember to focus on the sun and exclude anything that distracts or confuses the story. That’s called ‘composition’. It’s not a particularly hard skill to learn but so easily forgotten in a moment of adrenaline to get the shot.

Capturing the original purpose of a photo with a good composition makes the image stronger and clearer to ‘read’ for the viewer. Photographs that are aesthetically pleasing as well as interesting are the most successful.

4. Using the Zoom on a Camera Phone

Oh please never do this. It’s one of my top hates. Camera phones are awful as soon as you come away from the base focal length.

Digital zooms in general are pretty shocking but buried inside a fixed focal length camera phone means that the internal tech is creating a heavily cropped version of your photo without moving any optics. Its like taking a photo on a DSLR and then cropping into it 5 times – it’s not going to end up looking good.

There’s no more I can say about this as it should be banned. Phone manufacturers should take this option away if they really cared about photography until they master a better way to render the zoom so it doesn’t look like a pixelated Jackson Pollock.

5. 1-Click Presets

Yes presets, we all have our opinions on them and I’m pretty comfortable in using them but they aren’t a 1-click solution. So many photographers sell their preset packs under the guise they are a quick-fire answer to getting incredible edits.

While they help, they require more work than what’s being advertised. Don’t apply a preset and then export the shot – you ain’t finished.

Your photo isn’t the same as the one in the advert, therefore, the preset won’t look exactly the same. They’ve been retouched immensely before using the preset which isn’t being shown to you. The truth behind Instagram photographers and preset packs is something I’ll come on to another day but for now, let’s just say – use presets, by all means, they are great time savers, but tweak them afterward to suit your photo.

And not all presets work for your shots – even if you’ve paid for them, restrain yourself from using one every time.

Have I missed anything else out do you think? Are there more changes that we photographers could make to our art to improve the content, workflow, and quality of what we create? Let me know.