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Sometimes you go out to take a photo, you see something you don’t see everyday, or you notice something you’ve never noticed until today, you take the shot, you get home and open it up in your favourite editing software, you realise you’ve blown it! $*#@!

This happens to us all, and if you say it has never happened to you, you’re lying to yourself.

The most unfortunate and annoying thing about screwing up an otherwise amazing photo is that it’s going to be one of the same mistakes you’ve made 100 times before, but the 100 other times didn’t seem as important.

What happens if you write or take deliberate note of the mistakes you make? Eventually the list is more than likely going to contain a few recurring errors made throughout the hundreds upon hundreds of photos you’ll shoot. If you start to see these mistakes as a pattern, you’re more than likely going to do something about it.

One thing to note is that mistakes don’t all result in a binned image, a lot of things can be fixed. The mistakes you need to write down and tackle first are the ones that make you hit the delete button.

My booboos

I’ve whittled my list down to the 5 most damaging mistakes I make most regularly (I make lots of other mistakes):

1. Unrecoverable distorted objects in the corners of wide-angle shots: One of the unfortunate optical effects of wide-angle lenses is the distortion around the edges of the image. It looks like straight vertical objects on the periphery of your shot are being sucked into an invisible vortex near the centre. Vertical and horizontal levelling on the tripod helps this, but the only real way to prevent it is careful composition to crop out vertical objects from the corners of the shot. I will fix small things in Lightroom but anything large just ain’t worth the effort.
2. Blown out skies and/or reflections in long exposure shots: I live in a cloudy and windy place, unfortunately this means the sky is always changing, and the light in my images is almost always changing. Sometimes bright sunshine occurs in the Caithness sky between the cracks in the rain clouds, and this threatens to ruin my long exposure shots with blown out portions of sky and bright reflections on the water. Sometimes these things can be fixed in Lightroom using the Graduated Filter Tool, but not always. I could also use a physical graduated neutral density filter, but more often than not I’ll wait for a better day… blanket cloud cover is never too far away on the Caithness horizon, and that means I can achieve a longer exposure time than I can on a day of intermittent, bright sunlight.
3. Cropping too tightly, leaving no room for vertical straightening: This one should be at the top of the list, it will completely destroy an image beyond repair, but it’s the easiest one to prevent. If I use a tripod and a vertical/horizontal spirit level I don’t experience the rage this mistake generates.
4. Blurry photos from not using a tripod: Sometimes a tripod isn’t practical, like when I’m at some sort of event or taking photos on the street. These days, when I’m not doing those two things, I’m using a tripod… before that I was deleting images and swearing.
5. Busy backgrounds: Most of the mistakes I make can be avoided with more consideration when composing a shot. People seem to think that composition is all about getting the subject into the frame in the most pleasing way, but it’s also about keeping the crap out of the frame, too. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing worse than a subject that’s not adequately isolated from a distracting environment, be that in the background, in the foreground or at the edges. Shallow depth of field often helps me to achieve isolation of the subject, but more often moving around it to get a better angle is the better option.

So, there you go. Those are my crimes against photography, and I’m a repeat offender!