Common mistakes to avoid as a beginner Photographer

Today we're going to talk about common mistakes to avoid as a beginner photographer. Photography is always a learning process you've got to constantly be trying to improve your work and make it better. If you're watching this you're already on the right track and trying to improve your work by watching tutorials.

From the beginning of my photography career I was constantly educating myself about how to improve whether it was learning more about using my camera or learning how to improve pictures with programs like Photoshop and Lightroom looking over some of my old work and comparing it with my recent stuff really makes me realize just how far I've come and I'm sure if you've been in photography for a while you'll notice the same thing.

So I wanted to share with you a few of the biggest mistakes I made as a beginner so you can avoid making them and I'll also share the most important things I learned along the way that have improved my photography by leaps and bounds when I was just starting out.

I would get going in a photo session and forget to change my exposure when the Sun came out from behind a cloud or when we went into a shadier area if you're shooting like this you'll know what I'm talking about you'll think you're getting awesome shots and then you'll realize there goes the last 20 images when you get home you end up losing a good portion of the pictures too under overexposure and sometimes trying to save them because you think they're good and it doesn't really work.

There are three huge things you can do to avoid this problem.

First it took a lot of reminding myself to make a mental note every time the lighting changed so I could change with it and regularly check your images after you take them to see if you need to make a change.

The next thing you can do is slow down a lot of beginning photographers don't really know how to pose people so they spend more time just snapping pictures and hoping they'll get some good ones by the sheer quantity from the session take the time to frame your image so that it looks good and pause to tell your subject to do something differently if it's not quite working learn posing tricks from as many sources as you can and check out other photographers work to get some ideas.

Most often you'll have subjects who have no idea how to pose and aren't going to give you good candids by just standing there learning how to pose them you if you're faking a candid pose we'll increase the amount of good photos you have to work with this will also save you from having thousands of wasted images and the wear and tear on your camera will be so much less when you take the time to get a good image in your frame rather than clicking like crazy.

Finally the most important improvement you'll ever make is to start shooting your images in RAW format if you're shooting in JPEG you probably want to ignore this advice because it seems so much easier to just keep doing what you're doing and learning a whole new format and having to figure out the whole raw editing process sounds totally overwhelming but I can honestly tell you that this was the number one change that improved my wedding photography. Yes I was dragging my feet about switching over but the difference is completely amazing.

Let's take a batch of images for example if you had taken these images in JPEG you'd either have to throw them all away or try to brighten them with Photoshop and have a really green e final product if you taken this same batch of images in RAW format you'd be able to change the exposure in such a large spectrum. You hardly ever have a lighting change big enough to make you lose your images so there are some really important things you can do to improve your portrait sessions.

Number one pay attention to lighting changes and always check your images after you shoot. Number two slow down and frame your image properly. Number three learn how to pose your subjects and Number four take the jump and learn to shoot in RAW.

Thank you so much guys for reading this. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love. I'll see you soon.