Shooting wide open all the time, ignoring backgrounds, forgetting context — these aren't beginner mistakes. They're the kind of habits that quietly hold back even seasoned shooters, and most people don't notice until they look back at their own work.
Coming to you from Chris Tellez, this candid and example-driven video walks through five fundamentals that Tellez argues are easy to overlook, even if you've been shooting for years. He opens with aperture, specifically the habit of always shooting wide open. Modern lenses and autofocus systems have made shooting at f/1.8 or f/2 feel like a safe default, and Tellez acknowledges there are real situations where it makes sense: a chaotic getting-ready room at a wedding, for example, where a shallow depth of field cuts through background clutter. But he shows a specific engagement photo where he wished he had stopped down to around f/5.6, because a little more of the second subject in frame would have added weight to the moment without killing the background separation he was after. The Sony a7 V and similar modern bodies have made shooting wide open feel consequence-free, but Tellez makes the case that it's still a choice worth making deliberately, not by default.
From there, he moves into subject clarity: making sure the viewer immediately knows what to look at. He pulls up a street photo where a lone figure gets completely swallowed by a busy blue-toned scene. The subject is there, but your eye drifts because there's nothing anchoring it. He also shows a black-and-white conversion that backfired: the image had real visual interest in color, but losing that color information meant the subject no longer separated from the background, and the whole thing flattened out. Then he contrasts both of those with a shot of a kid in a Spider-Man mask taken in New York, where even though a backpack in the frame is technically sharper, the expression on the kid's face is so commanding that you never lose track of where to look.
Backgrounds get their own section, and Tellez is refreshingly self-critical here. He shows a casual shot of his partner where a door frame runs straight through her head, a mistake he made just a week before filming. His point isn't that the rule is sacred; he also shows a shot from a Pow Wow at Saugeen First Nation where a busy background works because it includes the Canadian flag alongside the Every Child Matters flag, which adds real meaning to the image. Context and layers round out the five fundamentals, and the layers section in particular is worth watching closely. Tellez goes through his own wedding portfolio and admits he doesn't use foreground layering nearly enough in his professional work, a gap he only noticed while pulling images together for the video.
The video works because Tellez doesn't just explain the concepts; he shows his own hits and misses side by side, which makes the lessons stick in a way that abstract advice doesn't. Check out the video above for the full breakdown, including his examples on context and layers and how they apply directly to wedding and portrait work.
No comments yet