Hey yo,

This thead was inspired by the other thread started by monstaxmatt.

A couple of my friends just bought DSLRS and wanted to do a photo shoot. There were lots of 'what happened to this picture' type of questions, and I thought I would share some observations of what the most common mistakes were:

1) Changing lenses.

Keep your lens opening to your body face down, to minimize the chance of stuff blowing into it.
If there is no wind, then you are keeping your sensor safe if you do this. Leave the hole face up and you're just begging for the guy next to you to sneeze or something.

Also, it's a good idea to peek at the lens you are putting onto the body. If there is dust on your lens, you are going to just pour it right into your camera.
Dirty Lens cap -> Dirty Lens -> Dirty Sensor = bad.


2) Don't poke the shutter button when you take pictures.
If you just push the shutter with your index finger, and release, you are probably going to bounce the camera.
The correct way to press the shutter is to kind of squeeze the camera like a hand grip.
This applies equal pressure on both sides, which results in no movement.

3) Larger aperture = smaller F number/F stop
Smaller aperture = larger F number/F stop
This confuses people, and I just usually just say 'F stop' after that, and I'll do that for other cmments.

4) I encouraged them to use either shutter or aperture priority.
If the picture was too bright, adjust it with Exposure compensation (Ev)

This worked great, until someone using Av mode popped the internal flash to take a picture. Guess what? Extreme overexposure. Why?

Normally, in these modes, if you lower the F stop, the shutter speed goes down as well.
Likewise, if you increase the F stop, the shutter spead increases.
This is because the camera is trying to expose to the same exposure, as you have determined by your Ev setting.
So regardless of how you change Aperture/shutter in these two modes, your picture should be roughly the same brightness.

However, your camera has a shutter speed limit, and your lens has aperture limits.
If the camera tries to 'auto adjust' Shutter, and it hits the shutter limit, then it will stay at max (or min) shutter.
This is not what you want - exposure is not going to be what you expect.

On the canons, it will warn you of this condition by blinking shutter
or aperture. Pay attention to that! I assume other brands have a similar warning.

Let's take a typical accident - crank ISO up to 800 since you were just shooting in a dark room.
Now forget you had that set, go outside during the day time, go into Av, go to the lowest F stop number. Pop the Flash for some fill.
Take a picture.

Although it is auto exposure, the picture will be highly overexposed. This is because You are now limiting shutter speed to 1/250 sync (due to flash sync). On canons the '250' inside the camera should be blinking, warning you the 'auto shutter' is no good. Start increasing your F stop number (taking pictures for observation wouldn't hurt) until your shutter reaches a number 'in range' and you can see that the number stops blinking, and your picture has a 'normal' exposure.

(second moral of the story - If you set your camera to some funky settings for a tricky situation, it is a good idea, after shooting to immediately set it back. This avoids the 'take a spontaneous picture and then realize that you had the camera at some weird setting' syndrome.

5) Learn good camera posture. You will be steadier and you won't tire yourself out so fast.

6) Chimping is a real good way to drain your DSLR batteries.
Batteries can last a long long time if you keep your LCD time reasonable.
My personal worst nightmare is running out of batteries or memory in the middle of a shooting day.


Those were probably the most blatent things.
Anyway, it would be interesting to hear any other 'I sure wish I knew that from day 1'.
Or hell, any stupid mistakes you made would be interesting to hear about.

Learn from other's pain, right?

- Frank

 

7) If your lenses come with a rigid lens hood, get in the habit of using them. Always. Even on a tripod.

Not only do lens hoods do the obvious job of blocking "stray" light coming in from the sides or top/bottom of your image, they also provide a substantial amount of protection. If the front of your lens is destined to get smudged or (gasp!) scratched, it's very unlikely that the offending object is going to come straight in from directly where your camera is pointing. Also, later on when you're comfortable handling your gear, the lens hood can help facilitate quicker lens changes using the steps Frank mentioned.

 

When provided with a neck strap, use it. Even if it's only wrapped once or twice around your wrist.

Gravity sucks.

 

Take a breath and think through what you are doing.

To rip a military term, "Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

Rushing in without thinking is what leads you to take pictures in broad sunlight when you were indoors using manual exposure.

Which leads me to my second point. Always shoot in RAW. It could save your butt when you shoot pictures in broad daylight using indoor exposure settings.

You also won't lose gear if you just take a breath and relax. I've seen people quickly struggle to get some kind of accessory or lens on, leaving their stuff all over the place, for that one shot. When it comes time to pack up, something always gets left behind that way.

 

i swore we had a thread like this before, but anyways good info there.