No photographer is perfect, and we all have our bad habits that we should probably break. What are your bad habits? This interesting video features a photographer detailing five of his and the effects they have.
Coming to you from Gordon Laing, this great video features him discussing five of his bad photography habits and they way they can affect his work. We certainly all have at least one bad habit, and the one that I know I am guilty of is shooting wide open way too often. Having an f/1.2 lens is a blast, and it can be tempting to basically tape down the aperture at its widest and shoot everything that way. I look back at some of my images from when I first got the lens and cringe a bit, because I sacrificed a better shot for showing off that extreme aperture. Once I got over the initial novelty and got back to properly choosing my apertures to make the best possible image, my photos improved noticeably. That is not to say I do not still catch myself reverting to f/1.2 for no reason. Old habits die hard, right? What are your bad habits? Share them in the comments!
As soon as I saw the title, my worst habit immediately came to mind. For me, it is not maintaining complete focus and concentration for long periods of time.
As a wildlife photographer, I will often find an animal, spend quite a while working my way into position, get the animal in the viewfinder, take a few test images and adjust my settings, and then have to wait for the animal to do something - such as lift its head up and look toward me, or strike an attractive pose, or perform some bit of interesting behavior or interaction with others of its kind.
Typically, an animal is in a really bad position for photos for very long periods of time, and then when it finally strikes a nice pose, it only lasts for a fraction of a second before the animal turns his head away or puts it back down in the grass to resume feeding. And so a good wildlife photographer must stand there at the ready for a long, long time. You must have the camera precisely aimed so that the image will be composed exactly how you want it to be composed. You must continually refresh the focus to ensure that the focus is precisely on the animals eye, and not the ear or the neck. Every time the animal moves a few inches you have to re-do the focus to account for the slight shift in his position.
Then, after you've been looking intently through the viewfinder for a long, long time, the animal lifts his head for, literally, a half second or so, and then puts it right back down again. Or maybe his head has been up all along, but he had a disinterested look in his eyes, and you sit there for a long, long time, hoping that at some point he does something expressive, such as roll his eyes or perk his head up and give an alert look for a split second. You have to be ready to hit the shutter at every moment. This can be hard when the animal has been there for 20 minutes and not done anything yet. I look through the viewfinder for a long time, then my eyes start to water because I've been trying not to blink, because if I blind I could miss what I have been waiting so long for.
So now we get to my bad habit. I am simply not good at maintaining the sort of razor-edge focus and concentration that is necessary to be in a state of split-second readiness for long periods of time. And therefore I usually miss "the shot", that one split second when the animal looked a wee bit better than he did at any other instant. Simply because I do not have he discipline or focus or concentration to stay split-second ready for 10 or 20 minutes at a time. At some point, I want to give my eyes and my brain a break and be a bit more comfortable and not so intent, and that's why I miss the very best instant and settle for a shot an instant or two later, because I wasn't ready to react fast enough.
That is my worst habit, and I honestly don't know if I will ever be able to break it. I have been acutely aware of this habit for over 10 years, and have tried to break it, but I am human, and therefore prone toward certain weaknesses. And this is one weakness that I don't know if I will ever be able to overcome.
Not turning off image stabilizer on tripod.
I keep reading this but have never seen any evidence; can't see why it would. I did test photos of a grid @ 200mm with/without and they looked exactly the same.
Anyway, not a biggie, an extra Hail Mary and you'll be fine.
Excellent and the last dialogue is to be heeded as we move to from DSLR.
Not shooting RAWs. Lol.
Okay, that was my problem a long time ago, now I do and can tell you that RAW saves lives but you know it already.