I have been doing photography for quite a while, and along the way I have made many a mistakes and learned from them. Though I still keep on making these mistakes from time to time, by acknowledging them I’m minimising how often they occur.
I have a few tips to share, a few that I think are not often pointed out when talking about learning photography. These tips are more to do with your camera gear, than the actual artistic action of photography.
Put the memory card/battery in
Yep, this is a tip, a real one, and I can’t be the only one who has gone to shoot without having a memory card in the camera. If you are like me and upload images by taking the memory card out of the camera and using a memory card reader, the chances are you sometimes forget to put the card back into the camera. I always try to make sure to put the card back in immediately after I’ve gotten the pictures out. Same goes with the battery. Luckily my big camera has two card slots so I always have at least one card in there if I forget the other.
Don’t leave the memory card slot open
This might be a weird tip, but as I’ve made this mistake of leaving the hatch open and then accidentally bumping the camera with something and having the flimsy little plastic peace break off, it’s an important one. When you take out the memory card or battery, immediately put the hatch back in its place.
Back up your images
You know this one already, make sure to store your images well. The first change you get after shooting, upload your files and store them. I have made the mistake of clearing the memory card on my camera from old images that I thought I had stored on the computer, later to find out that I didn’t have them anywhere.
What I always do, especially when travelling or shooting something more special, is that I never remove the images from the memory card before the trip is over and I can be sure I have all my images safely stored. Double check please.
Back your images up on a USB drive, cloud, hell, even print out the most important photos. Never trust only one way of storing images.
Always check the picture quality/size
When you start shooting, make sure you check your image quality before you start! I always suggest shooting in RAW, and RAW + jpeg if you like to share some of the images immediately on the go without doing the raw conversion. It sucks when you notice that you have been out shooting, thinking you have great images, only to later find out that you have been shooting small jpegs, loosing a lot of detail.
Protect your lenses
Keep the lens cap on when you don’t shoot, use lens hoods to not just minimise lens flairs, but to also protect your lens from anything hitting the glass too easily. For your more expensive lenses, buy quality clear filters to protect that precious glass. I once had a stone hit my lens from a car tire in a rally race, but because I had a clear filter on, only that one got scratched and not the lens itself. Keeping your lens scratch free will also help the lens keep its re-sale value, if you are ever upgrading or changing to a different camera system.
Charge your batteries
Having back up batteries is great, and having them charged is even greater. Make sure to have at least one full battery at all times, even if you haven’t planned on shooting. Sometimes you get a call to go somewhere fun and you might not have time to sit idle for an hour or two to charge your camera battery.
Keep the camera with you!
The last but not least tip, keep the camera on you, at all times! I break this rule of mine all the time because I’m lazy, and then I miss out on shots. Don’t make the same mistake if you are really into photography. Keep the camera with you even when just doing a fast grocery run, or taking your dog to a walk. You’ll never know what you see or what kind of skyporn emerges suddenly only for a few minutes.
This informational was inspired by me making one of these amateur mistakes yesterday. I had accidentally set my camera to take just jpegs, and not raw images. What a grave mistake. The image above could have been so much more dynamic if I had taken it in raw format, the lightest and darkest parts of the image could have had so much more detail in them and the colours would have been so much more vibrant.