More tutorials, a newer camera, and more hours in Lightroom will not make you a better photographer, no matter how much you spend chasing them. The traps that eat up beginners' time are easy to spot once you know them, and almost impossible to see when you don't.
Cody Mitchell lays out the specific mistakes that stalled his own progress for years, then explains what he'd do differently if he started over. The first trap is gear. Mitchell points out that when you admire someone's work, you can see the camera they used and buy the same one in two days, but you can't see the skill that actually made the image. He's putting his money where his mouth is by shooting more of his channel's photos on a Canon 5D classic, a 21-year-old, 12-megapixel body he picked up for $150 on eBay. A good photographer, he argues, can make a strong image on a prime, a zoom, a Sony a6600, or a Leica, because the work lives in the skill set.
The second trap starts the moment you see something pretty. Mitchell calls it the moth to the flame: you point the camera straight at the beautiful thing and expect a beautiful photo. A photograph of a gorgeous sunset just proves the sunset was gorgeous. Nothing in the frame shows your eye, your composition, or a decision you made. The fix is to pause and interrogate the scene. What about this actually interests you? Are you standing in the right spot? Should you be lower, higher, closer, zoomed out? Those choices are the whole craft, and skipping them leads straight into the next trap: coming home with 500 mediocre frames and telling yourself there has to be a keeper buried somewhere in the pile.
The copying question comes up as a bonus, and Mitchell's answer runs against what a lot of beginners assume. Emulating work you admire isn't plagiarism, it's the oldest form of practice there is. Painters copied masters for centuries before they found their own voice, and musicians learn by playing other people's songs note for note. Pull together a handful of images that speak to you, find the common thread, the light coming in from the side at golden hour, a 50mm look, a certain kind of subject, and go try to recreate it. You'll fall short every time, and that gap between what you attempted and what you got back is the lesson. This is the same principle behind deliberate practice in any skill: you improve fastest by reaching for a clear target and studying where you missed, not by wandering with no reference point at all.
If you dodge every trap, the path forward is composition, consistency, and volume. Mitchell frames it as getting photographically fit, and the analogy holds. Nobody pays a trainer and wakes up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You do the reps. Photograph the same object 30 different ways and some of those frames will be worse than your first attempt, but a few will surprise you, and you'd never have found them by getting it right on the first try. Nail the image in camera and Lightroom becomes seasoning on top of good ingredients instead of a desperate attempt to rescue bad ones. You cannot polish a turd, as he puts it, and no preset or film look changes that.
Watch the full breakdown in the video above to hear how Mitchell coaches students past all four traps and why he thinks the failing is the fun part.
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4 Comments
You know, I'm really getting sick of headlines telling me how bad I am. Not only is it click bait, it's goddam insulting. Change "your" to "my" and let readers decide for themselves whether they share the same challenges.
Here here.
A good talk presentation and time is never wasted for light changes many many times in one hour and never the same ever again for nature provides and as the saying goes "You have to be out there or never see anything"
A very good point it is not so much the gear totally but knowing how to USE all you have and where you use all of it. It is like a golf bag full of clubs and picking one to do the business at had. Getting a big book of info on the camera and all the operations it can do most all are somewhere around 600+ pages a lot of info for the brain to remember but reading again and again. Before I bought my first Sony A7SM1 I found info in a book store on all three A7models (it was the 2013 paper days not YouTube) and was coming from Canon T2i days that we used Canon's editor. Photographers today are given so many gifts not knowing what they have. Manual mode and selecting the settings is not proof you are great for anyone looking at the print the setting will never be seen so if you use Auto mode no one will know any way most images (98 % are captured in aperture mode and the camera's inside computer does the rest, so what as long as you get what you saw. A painting does not have information about all colors used or even where and when it was painted of whatever.
Getting the image back in 2015 with the A7SM1 magazines (yes paper) were hyping how the A7SM1 was the greatest for astro Milky Ways due to its high ISO when out in the deep darkness of where ever but I lived for a few years there and did not like the snakes. PhotoPills wed site was the only place to lean where and when. A non chipped lens also a key item to use. And no one had a Lens Correction but the maker and it did not work. Then info on how to capture with no camera NR on and capturing like ten images and putting in a program to did noise but keep stars, a lot of sugar for a dime! My first capture night was at a local beach at my Naval Base near by and I scouted and found a great foreground item of a Lifeguard chair and had to use the camera to find it again that night and PhotoPills showed a southeast point to aim, you could not see it at all. I pointed and set for a 30s capture but I knew to look at the Metering Mode on the rear LCD bottom to get a 0.0mm by adjusting settings of ISO with Selected SS and was just 3200. When i got home I aimed over my neighbors house and captured again.
It is all not even seeing but thinking and planning when and where and just playing but the "EYE" does see even at night at Antelope Canyon entrance that the photographer tour guide never saw the many years of giving tours while he went to check for nothing left behind I saw the rider on the right and the horse on the left but mainly joked to him you need to change the name (not saying what here what).
The bottom line it all is like experimentation but only you have the formula that you used and may never ever use again ore anyone else. The very main point is getting the formula from a 600+ page book or today PDF and reading about all things possible with all your tools for a YouTube video(s) will not cover all you need to know. Example just one chapter on A7RV focusing can spin your mind when trying to remember them all at the place you want to capture. You will also learn that the A7SM3 12MP is easer to make an image to put in E-Mails of 600x400 and smaller image files. and with experimenting with both getting like images that the A7RV lets you use faster SS's than the A7SM3 with the same lenses meaning that to capture a Milky Way arch one pass can be done in less than a minute and a half so with surf in the foreground all images will match up as a on image not many images at the same time.
A thought for your mind what months can you do a panorama that will include both the moon and sun at both sunrise and sunset? March and October.
Also your camera will capture night capture as bright as day but with stars even above the clouds all sharp as pin points as well as the foreground and you find yourself lowering the exposure to make it look like night that all will believe!