Today’s post is a listing of things that we frequently missed or forgot, subconsciously and consciously.

The aim is to avoid “…I should have…” or “I wish I had…” moments.

1. Dark Faces

This happens when the light source eg. the sun is behind your subject. This kind of mistake happens all the time even to someone who has taken a lot of photographs (less frequent though).

Example:

One way to fix this is by using a flash or a reflector or set the camera to centre weight metering.

The rule of thumb: “If the shadow leans towards you, use your flash or a reflector or set to centre-weight metering”

2. Missing Feet

So you’re on a trip and pretty excited with the things surrounds you. You take a snap of your trip group and by the time you came home you noticed something isn’t right… Their feet were cropped out!!

Example:

Maybe not everyone noticed this, but having the feet cropped out is a very common annoying mistake and many times a photo that should be great in the living room is lost.

3. Slanted Horizon

Sunset on the sea (or a storm cloud in this example) is always a great view to snap. However we have to take care that we don’t tilt our camera a tad bit. The horizon is very sensitive to angle and can be very annoying when slanted. Look at the picture below:

Slanted horizon gives an unsteady feeling, to address this, turn on your guide lines in the camera viewfinder.

4. Forgotten Manual Focus

The title speaks for itself. There was one time when I got a batch of blurred image because I had forgotten to turn my auto focus back on. The LCD preview will not do any justice since most image looks clear in there, however once viewed on your computer screen, great disappointment awaits.

5. Lazy to Take Another Shot

If you feel your shot is not up to scratch, shoot again. Trust me, there are many things that photoshop cannot fix; and you only know this after you got home!

That’s a starter list, there are many more common mistakes that we do, however above are the ones I felt most frequently happen.

There are many cases when photographers are not fully focused on one area of photography. The thing is, that many of us,are trying be good at every aspects of photography; for example: portrait, products, weddings, glamor, etc.

Unfortunately this wide diversity has driven us into getting to the area of photography that we didn’t want and when we don’t do what we like, we will not do very well. The main thing about getting good at photography and other business is to focus on your strength and develop on it. This is something that I’m learning as well.

The following video is an old video which many might have seen. It is showing the core values and mindset that has gotten Apple Computers out of their near bankrupt situation into a world leader in the IT industry as well as multimedia. After all, we especially photographers will know that Apple computers are great for photo editing and multimedia.

I wanted to show this video since though not directly related to photography, it shows a lot about focus, working with competitors and most importantly: Knowing Your Strength. Too much ego and wanting to solely defeat your competitors will do no good to yourself, I can say that this applies to your personal business as well not only for large corporations.

If you can’t see the video below, it means youtube is down…

I hope this video inspires you as it has inspire me!