Small Habits That Quietly Fix Boring Photos

Small improvements compound fast in photography, and most of them have nothing to do with chasing a new body or rewriting your whole editing style. This video is a practical reset for photographers who feel stuck, because it focuses on what you do while you are actually out shooting.

Coming to you from Matty Loucas, this grounded video lays out a set of repeatable habits that change what ends up in your frame, even on an ordinary day. Loucas starts with perspective, and he is specific about what that means in real life: stop defaulting to eye level and force yourself to change height and angle at every location. That can be as simple as kneeling, finding a step, or looking for higher ground that gives you a cleaner read of the scene. He shows how one small move can reveal elements you did not even notice at first, like overhead shapes, light sources, and the way people flow through a space. He also points out that “changing perspective” is not only about going up or down, since pushing in for details and tighter frames is part of the same habit.

The next idea is depth, and it is less about fancy tricks than about building layers on purpose. Loucas frames depth as foreground, midground, and background working together, so the viewer’s eye has somewhere to travel instead of hitting a flat subject and stopping. He talks through a scene where you could isolate the obvious subject, but you get a stronger image by keeping context and adding a nearer element that partially frames or interrupts the view. He keeps it simple: a leaf, a railing, a balcony edge, anything that creates a front layer without turning the photo into clutter. Then he adds a useful nuance that many people skip: layering often feels easier with a tighter lens, and a zoom can save you when you cannot physically move into the position you want.

From there, Loucas shifts into light, with an emphasis on backlighting and sidelighting when you are walking around a city or traveling. He contrasts the look of light hitting a subject from the front versus light coming from behind or from the side, and he demonstrates it by moving around a building to show how quickly the mood changes. He is not claiming direct sun is “wrong,” but he makes a clear case for why you may prefer softer, shaped light when you want images that feel less blunt. He also calls out color as a compositional choice, not a lucky accident, and he describes looking for color relationships that you can build a frame around instead of treating color as background noise. That part is easy to underestimate until you realize how often you shoot good scenes with dull color decisions.

Loucas also slips in a few camera-handling habits that are more about staying present than chasing settings. He mentions using aperture priority for street and travel work, then pairing it with Auto ISO so the camera carries the exposure shifts while you control depth of field. He describes setting up multiple Auto ISO ranges for different conditions, and keeping critical settings in a “My Menu” area so you are not digging through pages when the moment is already gone. He also notes that he shot many of the examples on XF 35mm and XF 23mm, which hints at how he thinks about focal length choices while moving through a place. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Loucas.