Hey Everyone! Hope you had a great week! This week I want to talk about Mistakes we all have made in photography. Now I'm not talking about when your learning the exposure triangle but after your a pretty good photographer but still beginning. Some of these mistakes have thrown me for a loop for hours of me trying to find out what in the world is going on. Trying to blame on my camera when it was just me and something I have done or not done. Hopefully after reading this if you do the dumb thing that I've done you'll recognize it quicker than I did. So here we go with the list of 5 mistakes.
1. Everything is blurry when I look through the camera. Have you ever been shooting and while your
looking through the camera every thing looks a bit blurry but when you preview on the back of the camera or use Live View everything looks ok? Well this happens to me quite a bit and its easy to fix. What has happened is that you have bumped your diopter adjustment on your camera. It's the little wheel that is just beside the eyepiece of your viewfinder. It is used to make corrections for folks that use glasses if they aren't using them. It only effects the view finder of your camera. Simply look through the viewfinder and look at the settings on the screen if they are blurry simply move this dial until they are sharp and now everything will be sharp when you look through the view finder.
2. I press the shutter but nothing happens. This happened to me when I first got a new camera. I went to a festival and was going to shoot all of the interesting things happening there with my new camera. When I first went into the festival and took that first shot and nothing happened. I turned on and off the camera to
see if that would fix it but nothing. I tried and tried and nothing. What had happened is I had accidentally pushed the button or dial in my case and put the shutter to a 30 second time delay. So when I pushed the shutter nothing happened. It took me quite a while sitting on a bleacher at the festival trying to figure out the menu of my new camera to figure out what had happened.
3. I take the shot and it seems brighter or darker than usual. This one has happened to me and it actually has a few causes that will make your camera do this.
- The first one is that you accidentally hit the ISO button and put your ISO way too high causing the sensor to be way too sensitive to light than it needs to be and the photo or photo's turn out too bright. Yep I've done it shooting along at 400 ISO and all of the sudden I'm at 25000. I had hit the button on the back of the camera, I had to reassign that button because I did it so much.
- The second reason is that I had accidentally put my camera in manual bracket mode. In this mode your camera at each touch of the shutter makes one dark one light and one just right exposure. Usually when I shoot in bracket mode I have it on continuously make the brackets with one touch of the button. But in Manual it does one at a time. I have shot like this for hours before I figured out what was happening. I eventually
looked at the back of my screen and made it where I could view a lot of the photo's at one time and I saw the pattern . One Dark, One just right, and one Bright. Thats when I had figured out what I had done. Luckily it was only set to half a stop of light so I could recover my photo's in post.
-The third one is that I accidentally hit the exposure compensation one way or the other . I usually figure this one out pretty much because I tend to use the exposure compensation quite a bit but it can happen.
4. Dead Battery or SD card full. I have seen people do this quite a bit. Especially in the DSLR days when batteries lasted quite a while. You show up at the site and bam battery dead. Whats even worse is if you have a back up battery and haven't charged it you're really dead in the water. The best way to avoid this or a full SD card is preparation before you go to the shoot . Always make sure your batteries are charged and you have a fresh card in your camera. And always carry extra's with you.
5. Spots on your images. When you get home after a longs day shoot you're excited to get your images loaded onto your computer to view. When you get there you notice that there are spots or a spot on your photo's. Especially when your stopped down to F11 or greater. The sky has spots all in it. You need to clean your sensor! You have dust on it! Keeping your equipment clean is something we must all do to keep our images clean. It is a simple as wiping down your equipment . If your sensor is dirty you can clean it but if your too scared too ,take it to someone that you trust to do it like a camera shop. With mirrorless cameras dust and dirt are more a problem than with old DSLR cameras because the sensor is right there when you change lenses.
So there you go 5 mistakes that we make while shooting. They can all be avoided if we take the time to learn our camera's and keep them serviced well. So until next week keep shooting and get outside!