10 Photography Mistakes I See All Beginners Make

If you're a beginner photographer, let me save you some time by telling you about some of the biggest mistakes I made when I was first learning photography and how I fixed them. There's 10 big mistakes in this video, and I'll keep every single one short and sharp. And let me know which ones you struggle with in the comments below, and I will try my best to help you out there. Now, before we dive in, if you're looking to take your photography full-time and you want to create a thriving creative business out of it, I'm releasing my new creative business mentorship called The Creative Leap on October 1st. And in it, I teach a four-phased approach to learn the best ways to monetize your craft and take it from passion to full-time thriving career. It also comes with an exclusive Discord community of like-minded growth mindset individuals bringing each other up so that you have support while you're building your new creative life. Now, if that sounds interesting to you, then you can check it out at pack. studio. And if you want to join the wait list, you'll be the first in line to get the lowest price for the first 100 students who join. Link in the description below. Number one, too many subjects. All right, the first mistake that I see most beginner photographers make is having too many subjects. If you're in a super exciting location, I know it can be super tempting to shoot wide, shoot everything wide, and you know, try to get everything in. But the problem is that if you have too many different subjects, if there are too many things to look at in the composition, too many things going on, the composition gets muddy and confusing. the viewer doesn't know what to look at and there's no direction or purpose to it. When you focus on having just one primary subject and other supplementary subjects supporting it, what happens is that you establish what's called a visual hierarchy. That's where there's a clear delineation between elements and the viewer can clearly see, okay, this is the most important thing about the image and this is what the image is all about. Oh, there's other things in the composition, too, and they're related to this main thing. When you keep things simple in this way, you can communicate more clearly. So, in more cases, in most cases, just having one subject or one group of subjects is enough. Number two, know who to learn from. I've said this so many times on this channel in the past, but for those who don't know this concept, here it is. Famous investor Ray Dalio in his book principles talks about this idea of believable people. You know to paraphrase the idea the concept is basically that there are going to be people in your life or people that you find that are more believable than others. As a default, everyone is going to have an opinion on just about everything. But that doesn't mean that they're all correct. Similar to how like doctors will tell you not to self-goole diagnose yourself and to actually go and see an actual doctor or like how you wouldn't believe someone who is giving you advice on how to get rich when they aren't doing so well themselves. Some people are more qualified to give advice than others. So find them. If you're a beginner, don't get advice from other beginners. If you're an intermediate, intermediates. Find people who are many levels, at least one level better at the thing than you are and try and get their advice. You know, I see this all the time where beginners want to get into a photography community like a Facebook group or something and that's all well and good and they think that, you know, by sharing their work there and getting feedback that their photos will be become better, right? But it's just other beginners giving this feedback to a beginner. Don't do this. Find believable people. People who have won awards. People who have been recognized by the industry, recognized by their peers, people who other people talk about. These are your believable people and people you can actually learn from. Number three, shooting wide open all the time. While you don't buy a prime lens because you want to shoot it at f4 all the time, sometimes actually that might be the best thing to do. You know, while it might be tempting to always shoot at, say, f1. 8 or f1. 4 or even f2. 8, sometimes you might get better gains by shooting at f5. 6 or f8 or even f11. Why? Well, a lot of lenses aren't their sharpest wide open at, you know, f4. Often times stopping down the range a little bit will actually sharpen your images up and start to remove things like vignetting and chromatic aberration. This is even more beneficial when you're shooting things that are further away like a landscape or something because of what's called your hyper focal distance or the plane in which the elements are in acceptable

focus. Without going into too much detail, if you're wide open and focusing very far away, then there's going to be many, many things in your composition in focus because the depth of field expands the further away your point of focus is. People use a fast aperture like f1. 4 mostly because of the look of the shallow depth of field or the bokeh, the out of focus blur. But if you're focusing really far away, then in many cases, the depth of field or what's in acceptable focus will look pretty similar wide open at that fast aperture versus something like f5. 6 or f8 or something like that. So, you might as well switch to that and get the increased gains of sharpness when things look pretty similar from a depth of field perspective. Now, I explain this entire concept in detail in my photography fundamentals course. So, if you want a link to that, I'll leave that in the description if you want a detailed breakdown on hyper focal distancing. Number four, knowing the difference between stylistic choice and a mistake. For beginners, 99% of the time, if your shot is blurry, you probably made a mistake. You know, whether that is your focus point or your focus area, your focus type, your shutter speed, your subject speed, depth of field, incorrect aperture, whatever it is, some element in the chain was broken and you have a blurry shot when you didn't mean to take one. If you make a mistake, that's totally fine. You know, the great thing about digital photography is that you can just try again. But don't be making those mistakes and then calling it a mood or a style or a look. Own up to your mistakes and don't parade them around as anything but. You want to be able to get to the point of skill where you can always shoot tac sharp images in any scenario but also have the ability to do the opposite to shoot short motion blur or long motion blur on demand. The tactical skill of photography is having ultimate control over every part of the shooting process and the goal should be ultimate control. You should be aiming to see a scene in real life and then imagine the composition in your mind and then go out and shoot that composition and have it turn out exactly how you imagined it in your mind. The mind to camera connection. From there, you can start to play around with artistic expression and such, but as a beginner, you should be practicing the techniques with intention, not by accident. Number five, breaking the photography rules. So, I have an entire playlist called visual patterns on the channel, and they are some of my most popular videos. In them, I teach an idea called visual communication, and the basic premise is this. Photography is a way to visually communicate. And like all good forms of communication, we communicate in patterns of understanding. Each individual word I'm saying to you right now has a meaning. And then those words are then combined into patterns called sentences to give them even greater meaning to what I'm saying. And then those sentences are then patterned into paragraphs and then chapters and then stories and then so on. Photography is the same thing. In order to visually communicate in photography, there are certain visual patterns we need to use in order to say what we need to say. These are different to how you might think about photography rules if you've come across them before. You know, I think photography rules are kind of dangerous because there's this like stigma that comes along with them that if you were to learn them and then break them that somehow magically you'll come up with some amazing novel idea in a composition and your photograph will then suddenly look great. But no, that's not how it works at all. Actually, it's the other way around. As soon as you break a rule, the rule doesn't exist anymore. It's a pattern of visual composition because when that situation occurs, it conveys the meaning successfully. As you break it, as soon it's no longer that pattern or that rule. Instead, the secret actually is to combine visual patterns together. That's where the magic happens. Anyway, for more on that, you can check out my visual pattern playlist series on this channel for free. Number six, getting trigger happy. One thing I highly encourage all beginners to do is to take your photos a single shot at a time. To not use the burst shutter feature and be really slow and steady and particular with your shots. You know, it's actually hilarious to watch a beginner with like a high drive mode setting on and then like holding on to that shutter for dear life reeling off hundreds of shots in just a

few seconds. I'm like, "Wow, you are going to have a tremendous amount of post production selections and a lot of deleting to do after this. " And you know, I get the anxiety, right, in things like portrait photography and like street photography where it's all about the tiny little moments, right? The decisive moment as Andre Carter Basson has been so famous in saying. But the thing about the decisive moment is that the skill of preempting that moment is far more valuable than holding the shutter button and praying that you get that exact moment. You know, photography, especially street photography, is far more than just about finding shots and compositions to take photos of. It's about observing and noticing what's really going around you and on in the scene. You know, seeing where the flow of foot traffic is going, observing where people are walking, talking, about to go. You know, knowing that a person is going to walk right in the middle of your composition or that a person is just about to come out of that shop or whatever the case may be. All of this takes experience. But you don't get this experience and the timing that comes with it if you just sit there holding the shutter button and getting all trigger happy. Slow down, take one photo at a time, and then move on. You will get way more keepers that way. Seven, not moving enough. Experimentation is the daughter to creativity. You know, I see many photographers find a composition that they like, they'll shoot it, and then they will just stay there the entire time. And if that sounds like you, I would highly suggest you move around and experiment with new compositions and new angles a little bit more. Doing so will give you the practice you need to be able to visualize shots better in your mind's eye. The endgame of this is where you've experimented so much that in any scene, wherever you are, in any city, in any country, in any setting, you can make something interesting with what you've got until you get to this point. Keep moving around and experimenting in every scene that you come across and you'll develop a lot quicker. Number eight, caring too much about style. If you are in your first one to three years of photography, you don't have a style. So don't worry about it. And honestly, this might sound a little harsh, but the style is everything. You know, true style is a reflection of who you are at a given moment. And as a beginner, you are learning still how to express yourself. know that most photographers, even intermediate and advanced photographers, don't realize that your style and your visual aesthetic are two very different things. Your style is more about what you shoot and how you shoot it. You know, the main driving forces behind your photography and why you picked up the hobby in the first place and the goals you have within the craft. how you shoot it and what your post-processing and editing you put on it looks like is your visual aesthetic. Now, people often mistake this and, you know, they think that by using someone's Lightroom presets, they are somehow closer to the style of that person that they're trying to emulate. But that's not really true. The visual aesthetic is governed by the style. The visual treatment you give a photograph is determined by why you shot that photograph in the first place. Within the first few years, you're still working on all of that. So rather than pigeon holing yourself into one thing, one style, go deep on many things and find out what you like. Focus on yourself and figure out why you take photos and where you want to take them. And over time, a style will emerge all on its own. relying too much on editing. Related to the last point, know that photography is and should be 70 to 80% the shot and 20 to 30% the edit. The editing is definitely important and I would never call an image done until it's edited. But still, a mistake that I see a lot of beginner photographers make is that they rely too much on the post production to fix their mistakes in the field. Now, this can result in some like crazy colors and trying to save blown highlights or not having any details in the shadows or, you know, even resorting to things like multiple exposures and like comping things in and so on. But when you get things right in the field in camera, it makes the editing process that much more streamlined. And I really mean that. Sometimes, you know, I'll hear photographers talk about their process and say like, "Oh, my editing takes like 45 minutes per photo. " And I'm like, "What?

Why? " Like, "What the heck are you doing with your photo? My edits take me 5 minutes tops. And when I'm using my own presets, I've got my process dialed in so much. I'm literally done in a minute. " The longer your process is, the less repetitions you get in doing it. And it is this iteration, this iterative process time and time again that helps you in understanding more efficient ways to get things done. So oftent times focusing just on the one image for a very long time can actually be stunting your growth. Number 10, not getting the reps in. As a beginner, how often are you shooting? 10 minutes a day, an hour a day, 2 hours a week, a few times a month. Like anything else, if you are desperate to get out of the beginner phase, you have to put the reps in. Photography is a skill like anything else, and it requires reps and time. Way before I even picked up a camera for the first time, I already had a decade's worth of visual communication experience through the many different disciplines of design in my back pocket. And yet, I still needed to practice for one or two hours every single day in order to get the fundamentals down and build the skill set up to where it is today. How many reps are you doing? All right, that's it. 10 mistakes I see beginner photographers make all the time. Let me know in the comments which ones you're currently dealing with at the moment. If you are, don't forget that if you want to go full-time doing photography, my creative business mentorship called The Creative Leap is going to launch October 1st. link in the description below. That's all for this video. Thanks so much for watching. Now, get out there and make something that matters. Peace.