4 beginner mistakes you should avoid (because I didn’t)
As a photographer you’ve got to start somewhere. From there, you gain more knowledge and experience. After some time, you begin to notice little mistakes you made when you just started out. These mistakes might make you cringe or frustrated with yourself for not seeing them then (at least, that’s what I did). So here are my beginner mistakes that you should try to avoid.
1/ Shooting in JPEG
A couple of months ago I bought a T-shirt from American photographer Jared Polin that has the words “I Shoot RAW” in big white capitals on the front. Every self-respecting photographer will understand these three words, and as a beginning photographer I also knew there was something like RAW images. However, the fact that they’re sometimes ten times larger (in megabytes) than a JPEG image, I almost never shot in RAW. “My memory card will be full in no time”, being the main argument.
A reasoning that has come back to bite me today.
I do have some decent shots from my early days as a photographer (like the one above), but since they were shot in JPEG, they are not as flexible to edit compared to the RAW images I shoot nowadays. They are larger for a reason: they contain a lot more information, which makes it easier to make more radical edits to them compared to JPEGs. With a RAW image you can make a summer scene look like early fall - good luck trying that with a JPEG.
So to all beginning photographers: shoot RAW! You’ll only thank yourself later.
2/ Caring too little about ISO
When I started taking pictures, I liked to play with the depth of field. I preferred shooting with apertures around f/5.6 to have the foreground and background out of focus as to draw more attention to the subject.
Besides the fact that f/5.6 isn’t ideal when shooting landscapes (already my preferred type of photography at the time), my obsession with the aperture made me neglect that other important part of the exposure triangle: ISO.
Yes, I knew that a higher ISO comes with more noise, but I downplayed this basic photography rule so I could be able to shoot at a fast enough shutter speed. Why I didn’t think about using a tripod then, God only knows.
Today, my tripod is an essential part of my gear. I even recently upgraded my entry-level tripod to a newer model that’s more suited to my needs today. Now, most of my images are shot between ISO 100 and 400, and I only go up when the situation requires it (i.e. a low light scene or when I need to freeze some motion when the scene isn’t sun-drenched).
3/ Thinking sunny weather is the best weather to shoot in
To some extent, and for some photography genres, this is indeed a valid thought. No one wants to have an outdoor wedding shoot when it’s raining cats and dogs, nor will a real estate photographer put his drone up into the sky when a storm passes over.
But when it comes to landscape photography, the sun isn’t an absolute necessity. Yes, a lot of the best landscape images ever made have the sun in it, be it a rising or a setting sun. But just as many of them were shot during a moody, overcast day, or even at night. For woodland photography (my favourite kind of landscape photography nowadays) the sun is even “the devil”: (Direct) sunlight creates hard shadows with a lot of contrast, which only hinders the viewer’s eyes and makes the image disorganised.
The best days for woodland photography are those with fog or overcast weather. Do you still want to include some sunlight? Then wait for a hazy morning where the rising sun creates bundles of light through the canopy. Or wait until the early evening to shoot the backlit leaves and foliage. But avoid a forest in the middle of a sunny day if you’re looking for a moody woodland scene, you won’t find it.
4/ Thinking every good view is a good image
I often hear from people around me that, at a certain location, “you’ll definitely make some beautiful pictures”. And indeed, that location is often very idyllic or the view is magnificent. But this is no guarantee for an equally magnificent image, something I did believe as an amateur photographer.
At the heart of this misconception lies the fact that our eyes see the world in 3D. Our brain interprets the depth of a scene just by looking at it. It can estimate how the different elements in a landscape relate to each other in terms of distance and scale to form a mental picture.
An image, however, is only a two dimensional representation of that three dimensional scene, as our camera can only see in 2D. The dimension that gets lost in the translation between view and image is the depth of the scene. In an image the different “layers” of a landscape get compressed, as if you would close either of your eyes and look at that landscape. Try this the next time you’re looking at a wide and magnificent landscape, and you’ll notice that it just became more flat and dull.
That’s why landscape photography isn’t just a matter of point and shoot. Composition is an essential part in the process of making a landscape picture. As a photographer you need to guide the viewer into and through the image. You do this by looking for guiding lines (a path, a ridge, rock edges), patterns and shapes, a clear foreground, midground and background, some sort of focal point, and by carefully composing all these elements into your final image. (You can further guide the eye through the image in the editing process with i.e. dodging and burning, but if the composition isn’t good to begin with, the editing will not save the image.)
So yes, landscape photography is often hard work, but it pays off better than when you would just point and shoot every scene upon arrival. You’ll get a lot of flat and boring images that will end up somewhere deep on your hard drive.
If you’re a beginner, I would urge you not to make the mistakes I did when I just started out as a (landscape) photographer. At first they seem to have their benefits (i.e. JPEG images take up less space on your memory card), but they will come back to haunt you in your dreams! Okay, that may be a bit overexaggerated, but you’ll certainly regret them later. Sometimes it’s better to learn from someone else's mistakes than to waste time learning from the ones you made yourself.