These are the top five mistakes I see beginner photographers make that I'm
also guilty of making when I first started and if somebody hadn't told me
about them I wouldn't have corrected them as fast as I did so this is what
I'm doing for you now these are very simple things to fix and they make all
the difference for your pictures mistake number one is keeping a level horizon
now I'm an advocate for always doing things in camera if you can so when
you're out shooting keep in mind that general principle is horizon should be
straight I see this all the time on Facebook and on Instagram for my family
and friends that take beautiful sunsets on the beach and their horizon is wonky
and it just ruins the pictures so if you've already taken the picture and you
want to fix it in post just go in your editing software of choice I use
Lightroom and click on your crop tool and just twist the image so that their
horizon is level you can also click the horizon leveling tool and click and drag
on the line of the horizon and it will straighten the image automatically for
you while we're on the subject of straightening lines the second biggest
mistake I see people making is when they're taking pictures of buildings and
architectural photography and older building lines are not parallel to each
other so basically this happens when you're taking a picture unless you keep
your camera looking straight at the horizon the perspective will be off so
basically if you tilt your camera up all the lines of the buildings will be going
upwards or if you tilt your camera down all the lines will be going downwards
it's easy to fix in camera if you have the wide enough lens if you keep your
camera straight with the horizon then all the lines should be straight but if
the composition you wanna shoot doesn't fit within your frame there are some
lenses called tilt shift lenses that basically move the optics of the lens
upward and it allows you to fit a lot more things in no no no everybody can
afford a specialized lens to shoot architecture I don't even have one so
the best way to fix is and the way I do it is in Lightroom in post-production I
basically shoot so that I have everything within my frame and I go in
the develop module and scroll down all the way to transform
and click that auto button and if that doesn't fix a perspective you can also
try the fool and if that still doesn't fix a perspective then you can try the
guided tool where you can click and drag lines on the lines of the buildings and
on the line of the horizon and that will straighten up everything
the third biggest mistake I see photographers make involves portrait
photography and that is when you shooting people and you basically cut
off their limbs or the toes or their fingers or the top of their head I'm
sure you can create some really unique compositions if you want to and that's
your intention but my general rule is to either keep everything in frame or if
you really want to cut off a limb cut strategically the general rule is either
cut at the middle of a limb so at the middle of the shin or at the middle of
the thigh at the middle of the forearm or just above or below the joints I
almost never cut off the top of people's head unless I want to go for a really
close-up portrait and it's really simple to fix with the crop tool in Lightroom
if you've made the mistake of chopping off fingers you can just copy a bit
closer in and that will just make a picture look way better than before the
fourth tip also involves portraiture and it's when people expose for the
background rather than the face this is a really easy mistake to actually make
because the camera metering will usually grab the largest area and meter for that
rather than the tiny little face that you might have in your shot there's a
couple of ways of fixing this in camera and number one is using a flash that
will make the exposure of the face match the exposure of the background however I
don't like to use this a lot of times because the flash light is quite harsh
especially if it's an onboard camera flash and so I like to use the second
method which is basically using a reflector to reflect the light back onto
the models face and that makes a much nicer and smoother light source than a
flash if you don't have a flash or a reflector this is really easy to fix in
post however you need to be mindful when you're taking the pictures to have a
nice average exposure so that your highlights aren't blown and your shadows
aren't crushed so when you bring it into Lightroom you have room to play with it
and the way I do it is I crop in the face quite closely and I check my
histogram I increase the exposure so that the face is properly exposed and
usually when you do this the background will be blown out complete
so then what I do is I grab a circular graduation filter and I click over the
face to preserve the faces exposure and I bring down the exposure for the
background and this usually works out really well to balance everything out
and the fifth big mistake I see beginner photographers make is not editing their
pictures or editing their pictures way too much there's a lot of purist
photographers out there who think that if you touch up their pictures and it's
cheating and if it's not straight out of the camera then it's not real
photography or whatever but what these people don't realize is that if you're
shooting in RAW and you should be shooting in roll basically your image
sensor flattens out your image and makes it a bit greater than what is actually
reality and that is to give you more dynamic range for you to play with when
you're editing in your post processing software however if you are shooting
JPEG there are color profiles that you can attach to the image which basically
baked the Edit in so it will bake in the contrast and the saturation and the
sharpness and the clarity and I don't know about you guys but I don't want to
do that I want to have full control of my image on the flip side of that
there's people who when they're starting out go way overboard with the Edit drag
the clarity slider up and the saturation slider up and the sharpness and I'm
definitely to this day guilty of this so what I like to do is I like to do my
edit and then pull back 10 to 15% on all the sliders or just come back the next
day and have a look with fresh eyes that I haven't gone too far with the Edit so
those are my 5 tips I hope you enjoyed them if you liked this video give me a
like and consider subscribing for weekly videos and hey go out and make some
pictures