Photography Rules Worth Breaking, and a Few Worth Keeping

Shoot wide open, keep your ISO as low as it will go, and save your landscapes for golden hour. You've heard all of it, and most of it holds up until a client books a noon ceremony or a waterfall starts looking better blurred than frozen.

On a hike, the best view of the Matterhorn might show up at 11 a.m., and walking past it because the sun is high makes little sense. Mark and Brenda Bergreen work through that exact scenario, using a polarizing filter to deepen the sky, turning so the sun hits the scene from the side, and going for a silhouette to simplify the scene and make the subject pop. As wedding shooters, they can't schedule around the sun. Couples get one day, ceremonies sometimes land in the middle of it, and the photos still have to be good. Family life plays a part too, since sunrise and sunset tend to collide with dinner, bath time, and getting small kids to sleep.

On camera settings, the Bergreens would rather drop the exposure triangle altogether, since aperture, shutter speed, and ISO each change an image in different ways and share no real geometric relationship. Instead of always shooting wide open, they reach for f/16 to get sunstars, f/5.6 to f/8 for group shots because people can't stand in a straight line, and f/11 for architecture they wanted sharp throughout the frame. Flash work pushes you toward smaller apertures as well, since stopping down darkens the ambient light while you keep your shutter under the sync speed. They also argue that a fully sharp frame makes composition harder, which turns stopping down into a useful practice exercise. On the shutter side, a 1-second exposure turns an ocean view into something closer to a painted color palette. For ISO, they'll push to 3,200 or 6,400 for stars and accept 12,800 in a dark, chaotic scene, since a grainy frame beats a missed moment.

Many of these rules began as workarounds for technical limits. The 1/focal length guideline for handheld shutter speeds dates back to 35mm film, long before in-body stabilization let you handhold several stops slower than that. "Keep ISO low" made more sense on early digital sensors, where noise climbed quickly above base ISO, and AI-based tools like Lightroom's Denoise, added in 2023, have pushed the usable range further out. Framing habits shift with how pictures get viewed, too. Instagram moved its profile grid to taller 3:4 previews in early 2025, which favors compositions that survive a vertical crop. When a rule feels rigid, ask what problem it was built to solve and whether your camera, your software, or your audience still has that problem.

Composition and cropping are next on the list. A centered kayaker with leading lines that show the journey, a skier framed so the shot crops cleanly to vertical for phones, and a tight frame of a family all wearing the same expression each lean on something other than the rule of thirds. The Bergreens also crop in post, even though they describe themselves as get-it-right-in-camera shooters. Their before-and-after pairs show how trimming a few edges pulls your eye straight to a little kid without a tie watching everyone else tie theirs. The gear section goes after the idea that a bigger sensor or a pricier prime always wins, and makes the case for a cheaper lens you'll actually carry into the rain or near crashing waves. They leave lens caps in the box because caps slow you down, and they skip UV filters, which they say add glare and hassle, in favor of a polarizer. A few rules survive the whole exercise, including a firm stance against tilting the camera to rescue a boring frame.

Their verdict on changing lenses in wet or dusty conditions is in the video above.