Nigel, one of the things I find so valuable about your videos is the humility and humanity you bring to your presentations. You are consistently so open to talking about times you have made mistakes. That puts those of us who are not so accomplished much more at ease in looking at the limitations in our own work. You really are an excellent mentor and teacher. Thank you!
Hello Nigel, Yes, I’ve made all of these and more! 😅 Thanks for this content and length. I don’t have much paciente for lengthy videos. To be honest your’s are the rare ones I watch above 15 minutes… 😊 Thanks
Over-editing has always been my downfall but lately I have been going back and resetting those edits. I think I over edit photos that aren't great and I'm trying to make them work. Sometimes, move to bin is the best course of action.
I did the same. It is part of our knowledge curve. There are things we understand more now and bad choices made in the past during the editing. But it's cool we can always go back and re edit, especially when a photo was disappointing and now the new editing makes it pops out:)
Has been one of my problems too. For me at least, I found my eye started to compensate for colour cast, brightness etc on screen, and I'd get more and more heavy handed as an edit session went on. A lot of bad colour edits, bad dodge and burn, over sharpening etc. Now, I walk away about every 15 - 20 minutes and when I come back I have a fresh look at everything I've done, and retouch if necessary. Still a shite photographer, but perhaps now a smidge less conspicuously shite.
Made the same mistake shooting the Volcano eruption in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland back in 2021, took probably 100 shots as a complete beginner and 80% of them were out of focus (simply didn’t know enough about shooting in low light at the time) I did manage to salvage a couple of shots in post but a classic example of almost screwing up a once in a lifetime moment, going back next week whilst another eruption is taking place (your drone image) and will have to evaluate whether it’s worth a two hour hike nearer the time (option is there) Understanding how your camera works is a must, mistakes are inevitable but we should all learn from them 😉👍
Good job! Photographing is complicated as we see different things. At 4:13 you would like the mountain on the right more in frame, I would add more to the left as the braking waves on the left are my focus point, It depends on how you look at an image….but this is hard judge if you aren’t at location. I use the tele lenses quite a bit for some years, I kind of feel when need to use wide/ultra wide, the usually means something interesting close up in the foreground. The mistake l make often is being lazy. That meant I needed a second camera body with with 2 prepared solutions for a smoother experience without laziness in optics swapping
A timely video for I am in the middle of trading in all my old gear with MPB for a Nikon Z6 and f4 24-70mm. I've never owned a Nikon before so I'll really need to spend some time to work out how to get the best from this camera. The 100% preview button is a really superb idea that I shall definitely implement! The mistake I've made the most is trying to AEB a high dynamic scene but being unable to merge the images due to tree branches moving or thinking I could hand hold it because the 5 images were taken so quickly - but not quick enough!
I have done most of the things you are talking about. a technique I learned with handholding my Nikon. Set camera to continuous shooting. I find the second or third shot is always in focus.
Great update and agree with all the points, especially over-editing. One thing I have to do myself is watch that I do not “snatch” when taking a photo and try to be smoother in how it do things. I now try to be calm, watch the breathing and take my time. 👏👍
3:30 I've owned a few ultra-wide zooms in the past but I always get rid of them because I rarely find myself in a place that has a scene good enough to include everything at 15mm for example. These days, I rarely ever find myself wishing I had something wider than 24mm, except for maybe indoors in a museum or something like that. I usually feel right at home with a 24-120 or 24-200 range and usually don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Focus- made the same mistake with switching to M and forgetting to go back to AF. And the small display was not big enough to become aware of it. It's why I would always shoot tethered to a computer with big display in a studio-type shoot - as my studio (lighting, background) is all mobile, when I rent a van and bring that out, the tethering comes too. As an old film-fart, I'm not used to "chimping" but assume I'm not making mistakes, "as I never would with film".
Hi , agree with everything you say. No one can remember all that you personally use from the manual so I call it revision like going back to school. With my memory that's a MUST! 🙂🤣Cheers.
Thanks again for the great video Nigel. You're my go-to guy for instruction on how to improve my work. I appreciate how much time and effort you put into these videos! Cheers from Lake Tahoe, CA!
I am just back vom Svalbard myself, with my new Z8 (which I learned to use during the trip) I had a similar situation with a polar bear in the rocks on an overcast day. I used my adapted SIGMA 150-600 at 600mm with 1/1600s, f8 and ISO 1000 to shoot from a boat (about 150m away). Although the animal eye detection locked onto the eye of the bear the pictures all came out some grainy (not bad, but still not tack sharp). Probably I made something wrong, which proves your point of always knowing your gear.
Thank you for humbly sharing what a lot of photographers would never dare to share. Mistakes happen all the time. I know the feeling, my Pentax medium format camera, where I mostly only use manual and all-too-often see (too late, when back home) I’ve not changed a setting when changing other parts of the equation. Thank you for good reminders. I still thought your footage was great!
Thanks for your videos, I am just catching up on some as I was out for holidays :-) My biggest failure (I think): getting overexcited in the field and therefore missing a setting for example seeing a bird fly into your landscape and being so happy it is on the right spot but then afterwards realising I forgot to adjust the settings to comply with a moving bird in my otherwise still landscape (for example adjusting to a faster shutter speed)
You're so right about checking the focus on the images before you leave the scene! I take more macros than landscapes and yesterday I missed the focus on a focus stack on a row of dew drops on some prairie grasses. Didn't see it until I got the images up on the computer. I realize the camera can do the focus-stack shooting but when there's the slightest breeze, that method is impractical with macros. Maybe AI will give us talking cameras that tell us when we goofed up, as in "Uh Bill, I think you missed the focus on that last dew drop!"
Not knowing my new camera (Canon EOS R7) has led to a few failures, but I'm getting there. Still far from perfect though. Life has gotten in the way a bit lately from me getting out but I just have to manage my time better. Your videos are terrific. I always enjoy listening/watching them. Thank you.
Framing is something i had to learn the hard way, to make sure the subject is framed with thing that make sense, not to have a half tree on the edge or a branch sticking out from nowhere. And its more important when shooting in 24MP since cropping gets more sensetive
I always read the manuals from front to back of all my cameras before I use them. I also have the manuals downloaded on my phone to refer back to, but I know them like the back of my hand now.
Biggest on my my side is being too lazy to setup the tripod for focus stacking and not checking the focus in the view finder before leaving, Also not taking reading glasses to be able to use the back screen in the first place LOL. For tripodless wild life or any other photography I set the shutter and aperture and go with Auto ISO and hope DE-NOISE will make it good in post
I remember, from the 80’s, Bob Ross, the famous painter used to say… “We don’t make mistakes, we have ‘happy accidents!’ “ - it’s a great way of thinking! Some of my ‘happy accidents’ have turned out as nice artistic abstract-style images!
I've learned to shoot scenes at varying focal lengths to get the image I want although sometimes I still fail to do this. The big one, however, is over editing. I now never finish an image without letting it sit in Lightroom while I do something else for a couple of hours at least. Just the other day I did this and found that there was way too much red in a shot taken at sunset. Thanks Nigel for all the great videos. Can't wait to see images from your trip with Mads and James.
We went to Hawaii last fall and didn't really understand the drone as well as I should have. Great photos but missed tthe best shots. Will fix that on the next trip in a month. Lots of practice this summer.
Smirking, my British friends tell me the F is for Fine, in Read the Fine Manual (RTFM) and I did that repeatedly. As a principle, Nigel, you are totally right. In the way our teachers told us that, if/when they woke us up in the middle of the night and asked question X, we should automatically respond the answer to X, we must in the same way understand our cameras. So I actually created an Excel of all the menus that retains the structure in the camera, can be sorted in another way and later arranged back in camera order again [1]. With that I can easily group, say, AF subjects. Does that help, out there? No. I still need to remember the logic of why part of AF is in one chapter and another is in another chapter. The problem with these guides is that they are definitions in large part and often "tautologies". An electronic camera has an On/Off switch and what does the reference guide say: this is the On/Off switch. Tautology. Zero added value. What it leaves implicit is, "if you want to use this device you better switch it on." Aussie BIF [2] shooter Jan Wegener in one of his videos discusses a Z 9 or 8, and complains about lenses AF hunting. Then he presents a workaround that works well. There are limitations that nobody (influencers) talks about. AF may work down to, say, -4 EV, but eye recognition may need more than 4 EV (8 EV less sensitive). [1] I feel that Nikon could have added a menu export function to their camera menus that exports all menu choices into a .csv file or so and potentially can be imported into another camera. [2] Birds In Flight
One of my constant mistakes to make - and I did it again this morning - is to not check my camera settings before I start photographing. I did a birthday session last evening, had the camera in AF-C with ISO between 400 to 800 and forgot to reset before going out to the beach this morning. Well, I don't have to tell you what happened! 🤦♂😄. Lesson learned: always check your settings OR just program a user setting (Nikon).
Thanks Nigel for reminding us that it's normal to make a mistake once in awhile. I made a big one about a week ago. I shoot some live music as well as my landscape. Last week I shot one of my bucket list people and I didn't check my camera well enough and I shot the whole thing in jpg which I would NEVER do. I'm not even sure how it got set for that. I was deeply embarassed and managed to pull enough images from the shots. I will add that setting to my pre-show checklist now.
... short video, but very informative... a few weeks ago i started wildlife photography, after 4th-5th shooting i decided to go with auto-iso, there is nothing more annoying then blurred photo of moving animal...
I often tend to shoot the wrong focal length rather than changing lenses to get to the right focal length. But the mistake I make most often is to forget to switch image stabilization off or on as the camera goes on or off the tripod...especially bad when you wind up handheld without IS. I've created checklists to try to eliminate some of the errors I make. All these things happen while hurrying. Funny thing regarding the photos from other photographers that you put up as not over-edited: I felt that at least two of the three were quite overcooked.
Thanks for sharing Nigel, I saw on Twitter you were also at the volcano so I wondered when we'd seen footage of that on youtube. Bummer for the unintended manual focus. Heat diffraction made for a hard time focussing. Even with the right focus distance that image can be blurry with the intense heat. I found another reason the autofocus of my drone wasn't working: flying too close to lava ;-)
Just came back from a bucket list trip to the Faroes, and while there I of course took a series of images from the Gasadalur waterfall at sunset, and had a failure moment that hurt. To get an idea of how a bracketed and edited image would look, I took an HDR image on my Canon RP. Looked nice. Switched back to my preferred manual mode and shot a half hour worth of brackets in JPEG! Forgot that the auto HDR mode changes the camera to JPEG. Promptly ruined 95% of the images until discovered the error just before last images. Able to save 1 bracket, but all the ones with better clouds and light were lost! I WILL NEVER FORGET TO CHANGE BACK TO RAW AFTER AUTO HDR NOW!!! 🤐
As frustrating as it is, I also think failure is important in the process of learning. Last week I was at the Mondial Air Balloons in France (a huge gathering of hot air balloons), and wanted to make a timelapse of the inflations. My camera was ready on tripod, focused, then I realized my tripod was touching the fences where kids were playing. To avoid any shaking visible on the timelapse, I stopped the shooting, moved my tripod 10cm away then turned back my camera on and continued the automatic shooting. Unfortunately the focus moved a bit while restarting it, so my whole footage is blurry... Over-editing is also something I realize when I see some old edits of mine. It could be interesting to see more of your editing evolution!
When we don’t fail, we don’t learn. I am into photography for about 45 years now and still there are mistakes to be made… mostly I am not happy with either the perspective chosen or shooting at higher iso (+1600) … but for that I am to lazy to take a tripod with me (most of the times). Like in Belgium last year on the beach: great light before nightfall but no tripod. So I had to improvise with my bag🤫but then I have to remember like what in velvia50 days I always did: taking a Monopod with me. It’s even a great support when hiking. (At least it could help in some situations) And even if it’s clumsy and heavier: I do prefer fixed to zoom-lenses. So I mostly walk two camera bodies, lenses attached, and one or two longer lenses in the bag - 24 or 28, 40, 90&135mm or when shooting light the 40mm or a medium-format and the 80mm. Always good light!!
I have done most of these but my most persistent mistake is forgetting to check that the memory cards are in the camera😕 Also I just finished your Luskentyre book. It is fantastic and the biggest surprise are the abstract photos at the end of it-they are truly magical. Thanks for all your efforts!
Enjoyed the video as usual Nigel. You must have been gutted when you saw your drone image's out of focus. The drone footage of the volcano was amazing and probably something that you would treasure as you witnessed it first hand. Very interesting points in the video especially focusing. The times that i have taken a shot using back button focus and then gone to take another shot a few seconds later and forgot to press the back button again, i have lost count lol. Look forward to seeing your next video.
Nigel you mentioned your settings when shooting with high shutter speeds as using shutter speed and auto ISO. This often gives results with dark subjects against bright backgrounds for instance. I shoot manual shutter and aperture with auto ISO as well but one control you did not mention was exposure compensation. It makes for better starting images with auto ISO if you can quickly change exposure on the fly with an eye to the histogram. Butch
My biggest problem is trusting the camera. I try to shoot in manual as much as possible and believe the shutter speed corrector. Most times it doesn't turn out right snd the shot is out of focus. So, I then shoot in iA, the shots look better, but the main difference is the high ISO its using. Onwards and upwards.
Oh man... Mine was at Capelinhos Volcano, Azores... I had perfect conditions for some astrophotography. My A7iv has double slots for sd cards, so I usually shoot redundant. But my card got full just after sunset, and I started using the 2nd card... except you need to configure shooting raw for both cards... all, yes, ALL of my astrophotography photos are JPEGs. I couldn't believe the next day 😅
I don't have auto focus bracketing in my camera, and that's my biggest issue. Often I think I have everything in focus, only to find out when I get home that I don't. My second biggest issue is editing. Editing is hard since there isn't really a right or wrong way, and you can go so many different ways with a single photo. I always try to edit as little as possible, to stay true to what I actually experienced in the field. But it's so tempting to rock all the sliders in the post processing software 🤷♂️
Short, Sharp and extremely thoughtful and useful. i now do a number of camera checks before I place it in my camera back before even heading out. Batteries charged, Cards clean and loaded, basic camera settings for intended shoot. Minimise failures "“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” - Benjamin Franklin."
Good video Nigel. I would add learn to see mistakes as an opportunity to learn, and not to be scared to make mistakes, as that's how we improve as a person and in our photography skills. However making the same mistake over and over is inexcusable ;)
I still have trouble telling if something is in focus, even when checking. Also, I'm not much of an expert on lenses. I have mostly used a zoom and a wide angle zoom, but just got a 50mm (used) and it's a whole new game. It wasn't focusing close up, so I need to find out if there's a minimum distance, or maybe the lens isn't working right.
I wonder if the foreground image issue at 5:22 might have worked better if you had gotten lower, and made those stones much more prominent. I can see I think you were trying to have the stones lead up to the trees. Maybe a lower elevation would have made that more explicit?
I wish your masterclass videos were available to buy as individual modules. I'm sure they are all brilliant, but it's a lot of money if want an editing course just for woodland photography.
Your points about focal length and crop or zoom and foreground are all valid and relevant but you miss the one buzzword: perspective. Perspective is determined by camera-subject distance, angle between optical axis and subject, and height relative to horizon. And the examples you use to illustrate your points ar mostly about perspective. I learnt this in perspective drawing art class, in theory, that I could apply in a drawing, but I only really learnt to "see" it after 10,000 conscious photographs and that's a lot with film photography - the brain was trained. All of a sudden I saw photos in my head before I took them, including what the effect (image angle) of focal length would be and perspective it would give at the certain distance. So this also enabled me to imagine an image and its perspective from a different camera position. That imagination is not perfect but I'd say 80% confidence level. It means I can walk around without looking through my camera and find the position, perspective, that gives the desired result. Or in the case of a portrait, I can ask the sitter to move to a slightly different position that may be a bit more flattering, relative to their imperfections. This is not to brag, just to underline the point you make, Nigel, and to repeat that we cannot train the brain by watching videos or reading books or looking at photographs of other photographers. There's no substitute for repetition, and DIY.
Nigel, It’s funny about how you are talking about knowing your camera. I just switched from Sony to Nikon Z7ii and I am struggling in trying to set it up and most importantly as you said to take AE BKT handheld and focus stack. Do you a reference guide that you could share to get me started. Thank you for the informative videos
I had a quick question for you. I take alot of landscape photos in the mountains. When I take the picture everything looks great however sometimes there is a white haze that I can not get rid of at the base or the middle of the mountain. I'll use the dehaze tool to touch it up but I can only get rid of about 30% of it. Do you have any tips on getting rid of it or some sort of tip on how to negate it when I take the photo.
What I would say(and not trying to sound like a smart arse) is shoot like a professional! When I was working in a pro capacityI would be on an event or shoot, I’d always make time to go through my settings, if you know your gear well you can learn to do this in probably 10-20 seconds, the point about shooting like a pro is one can not afford to mess up ! If you make a special trip or set aside time for a shoot making fundamental mistakes can be a total disaster, money wise and reputation wise! To travel to say Iceland then realise when you get home you had made mistakes which could have been avoided by using that vital twenty seconds to check things on location would be maddening. If one is an amateur, hobbyist or pro taking care and working as if a pro can literally save the day! 😀👍👏
First month learning about photography, went on a trip and took tons of landscape photos, wondering why people don't just always shoot at F22 to make sure their entire landscape is in focus all the time...... ugh...... surprise, not a lot of sharpness, just a lot of homogenous fuzzy outlines.... gah! Lesson learned.
perhaps on small prints/viewing devices slightly out of focus images are fine, and good enough to keep memories and documenting the place, or....maybe some clever AI can rescue some of them ...
Over-editing - the photos from other photographers you use to illustrate the point and say they edited a lot but not too much ... I think your Yosemite shot is a lot better than theirs. Theirs look over-edited, HDR and to some extent fake. Theirs is a style I really don't like. The sky darker is wrong? I sailed a boat through wetlands with reed as far as you could see. The sky was overcast with dark, dark clouds. Behind me the clouds had broken open and sun shone through. The view was magical, with the reeds and water in sunlight under a threatening dark sky. I would imagine with the time you spend outdoors in British landscapes and British climate, you have seen this many a time. It's real, Nigel. And magical, but you need to find the right perspective to work with it ;)
Simple mistake that ruined quite a few shots. Was shooting an indoor concert in incandescent light and not adjusting the white balance for the light and then leaving it on auto iso. A majority of the resulting images were utterly unusable they were so noisy that I couldn’t fix in post… iso pegged up well above 18k even though I was using an f2.8 lens opened all the way up… was very disappointing.. got really nervous I was blowing shots so made the worse choice of setting it on “P” mode for several images for fear of missing moments.. even worse decision! Realized the errors and at least corrected them so as not to lose everything but it was a harsh reminder to confirm settings with test shots beforehand…
A sharp image is better than a noisy image, you say. You mean something else. A noisy (grainy) sharp image is better than a blurry image without noise. My thoughts go out to Kodak Tri-X (B&W negative film) and its "lovely" grain and sharp images with that.
@@martharetallick204 - I used Diafine and went higher (35mm). My preference was the 120 film, sometimes in Rodinal, or else HC110 (IIRC) probably most in D76.
I get caught once in a while when I forget to turn bracketing off. Ex. I may have had it on in an early shoot. Later I take a photo and check it and it looks fine but the next two shots are over and under exposed.
My most common mistake is forgetting I've got a polarising filter on the lens! It's not the end of the world but you end up with a bit more work in Lightroom later.....
My latest mistake was that I somehow got my Z9 switched from RAW to JPEG and did not check settings before starting a day of photography in Yellowstone. I did not catch the mistake for several days, so I had some valuable images, that were compromised. I have no idea how the switch got made because I never intentionally shoot in JPEG. Also, I could not get my camera to return to RAW and ended up having to reset the entire camera and go through the laborious process of re-configuring all my settings.
Biggest fail: forgetting my memory card when going out to shoot a sunset. Nothing dramatic in the end, but I realized I only got three braincells and two are on vacation. The messed up detail only I know about and nobody else notices it but it keeps me up at night: Taking an epic 20 picture panorama from a hike in the french Alps, stitching it together when back home only to realize one of the pictures is kinda blurry because I probably didn´t wait the 2 seconds for my camera to stop shaking and wobbeling after adjusting the camera on the tripod. Now I have a beautiful panorama but when you look closely you can see a vertical stripe that is blurry while the rest is crisp sharp. It´s so small you really have to look for it but it jumps at me every time I look at the picture.
Not reviewing image in the field and missing the chance to correct obvious composition error. Usually because taking too many shots and not focussing on capturing fewer but better quality images.
Well, you're still holding your drone after shooting an active volcano, so it obviously wasn't that bad of a mistake. Maybe returning from location with useless footage is worse; it's debatable. For myself, maybe not paying close enough attention to the entire frame, with the idea in mind that I can crop or edit out in post. That generally hasn't been my style, coming from a film/journalistic background, but the "fix in post" mindset can lead to some bad habits.
Nigel, one of the things I find so valuable about your videos is the humility and humanity you bring to your presentations. You are consistently so open to talking about times you have made mistakes. That puts those of us who are not so accomplished much more at ease in looking at the limitations in our own work. You really are an excellent mentor and teacher. Thank you!
Wasn't aware about auto focus stacking! just checked my camera and there it is! Thank you!
Hello Nigel,
Yes, I’ve made all of these and more! 😅 Thanks for this content and length. I don’t have much paciente for lengthy videos. To be honest your’s are the rare ones I watch above 15 minutes… 😊 Thanks
Over-editing has always been my downfall but lately I have been going back and resetting those edits. I think I over edit photos that aren't great and I'm trying to make them work. Sometimes, move to bin is the best course of action.
I did the same. It is part of our knowledge curve. There are things we understand more now and bad choices made in the past during the editing. But it's cool we can always go back and re edit, especially when a photo was disappointing and now the new editing makes it pops out:)
Has been one of my problems too. For me at least, I found my eye started to compensate for colour cast, brightness etc on screen, and I'd get more and more heavy handed as an edit session went on. A lot of bad colour edits, bad dodge and burn, over sharpening etc. Now, I walk away about every 15 - 20 minutes and when I come back I have a fresh look at everything I've done, and retouch if necessary. Still a shite photographer, but perhaps now a smidge less conspicuously shite.
@@daemon1143 😂😂 I think it’s easy to over compensate when you’ve take a dodgy photo.
Agree, less is more most of the time !
@@jensbjorkkvist I've learnt to just give up trying to rescue an image with bad lighting or composition and move on.
Made the same mistake shooting the Volcano eruption in Fagradalsfjall, Iceland back in 2021, took probably 100 shots as a complete beginner and 80% of them were out of focus (simply didn’t know enough about shooting in low light at the time) I did manage to salvage a couple of shots in post but a classic example of almost screwing up a once in a lifetime moment, going back next week whilst another eruption is taking place (your drone image) and will have to evaluate whether it’s worth a two hour hike nearer the time (option is there) Understanding how your camera works is a must, mistakes are inevitable but we should all learn from them 😉👍
Good job!
Photographing is complicated as we see different things.
At 4:13 you would like the mountain on the right more in frame, I would add more to the left as the braking waves on the left are my focus point, It depends on how you look at an image….but this is hard judge if you aren’t at location.
I use the tele lenses quite a bit for some years, I kind of feel when need to use wide/ultra wide, the usually means something interesting close up in the foreground.
The mistake l make often is being lazy.
That meant I needed a second camera body with with 2 prepared solutions for a smoother experience without laziness in optics swapping
Oh my...I'd be MENTAL if I accidentally left my drone in manual focus. That's really unfortunate. :( But as you said, mistakes happen.
A timely video for I am in the middle of trading in all my old gear with MPB for a Nikon Z6 and f4 24-70mm. I've never owned a Nikon before so I'll really need to spend some time to work out how to get the best from this camera. The 100% preview button is a really superb idea that I shall definitely implement! The mistake I've made the most is trying to AEB a high dynamic scene but being unable to merge the images due to tree branches moving or thinking I could hand hold it because the 5 images were taken so quickly - but not quick enough!
I have done most of the things you are talking about. a technique I learned with handholding my Nikon. Set camera to continuous shooting. I find the second or third shot is always in focus.
I found your channel today. It’s brilliant, thank you.
Great update and agree with all the points, especially over-editing. One thing I have to do myself is watch that I do not “snatch” when taking a photo and try to be smoother in how it do things. I now try to be calm, watch the breathing and take my time. 👏👍
3:30 I've owned a few ultra-wide zooms in the past but I always get rid of them because I rarely find myself in a place that has a scene good enough to include everything at 15mm for example. These days, I rarely ever find myself wishing I had something wider than 24mm, except for maybe indoors in a museum or something like that. I usually feel right at home with a 24-120 or 24-200 range and usually don't feel like I'm missing anything.
Focus- made the same mistake with switching to M and forgetting to go back to AF. And the small display was not big enough to become aware of it. It's why I would always shoot tethered to a computer with big display in a studio-type shoot - as my studio (lighting, background) is all mobile, when I rent a van and bring that out, the tethering comes too. As an old film-fart, I'm not used to "chimping" but assume I'm not making mistakes, "as I never would with film".
Great tips as always - time to remember all this for my photos - check those settings and that manual focus
Hi , agree with everything you say. No one can remember all that you personally use from the manual so I call it revision like going back to school. With my memory that's a MUST! 🙂🤣Cheers.
Thanks again for the great video Nigel. You're my go-to guy for instruction on how to improve my work. I appreciate how much time and effort you put into these videos! Cheers from Lake Tahoe, CA!
I am just back vom Svalbard myself, with my new Z8 (which I learned to use during the trip)
I had a similar situation with a polar bear in the rocks on an overcast day.
I used my adapted SIGMA 150-600 at 600mm with 1/1600s, f8 and ISO 1000 to shoot from a boat (about 150m away).
Although the animal eye detection locked onto the eye of the bear the pictures all came out some grainy (not bad, but still not tack sharp).
Probably I made something wrong, which proves your point of always knowing your gear.
Excellent. I always learn something new in your videos. Thank you, Nigel!
Thank you for humbly sharing what a lot of photographers would never dare to share. Mistakes happen all the time.
I know the feeling, my Pentax medium format camera, where I mostly only use manual and all-too-often see (too late, when back home) I’ve not changed a setting when changing other parts of the equation. Thank you for good reminders.
I still thought your footage was great!
Thanks for your videos, I am just catching up on some as I was out for holidays :-) My biggest failure (I think): getting overexcited in the field and therefore missing a setting for example seeing a bird fly into your landscape and being so happy it is on the right spot but then afterwards realising I forgot to adjust the settings to comply with a moving bird in my otherwise still landscape (for example adjusting to a faster shutter speed)
The drone shot looks fantastic on my phone. The tips are great reminders. Thanks for sharing.
You're so right about checking the focus on the images before you leave the scene! I take more macros than landscapes and yesterday I missed the focus on a focus stack on a row of dew drops on some prairie grasses. Didn't see it until I got the images up on the computer. I realize the camera can do the focus-stack shooting but when there's the slightest breeze, that method is impractical with macros. Maybe AI will give us talking cameras that tell us when we goofed up, as in "Uh Bill, I think you missed the focus on that last dew drop!"
Not knowing my new camera (Canon EOS R7) has led to a few failures, but I'm getting there. Still far from perfect though. Life has gotten in the way a bit lately from me getting out but I just have to manage my time better. Your videos are terrific. I always enjoy listening/watching them. Thank you.
Framing is something i had to learn the hard way, to make sure the subject is framed with thing that make sense, not to have a half tree on the edge or a branch sticking out from nowhere. And its more important when shooting in 24MP since cropping gets more sensetive
I always read the manuals from front to back of all my cameras before I use them. I also have the manuals downloaded on my phone to refer back to, but I know them like the back of my hand now.
Biggest on my my side is being too lazy to setup the tripod for focus stacking and not checking the focus in the view finder before leaving, Also not taking reading glasses to be able to use the back screen in the first place LOL. For tripodless wild life or any other photography I set the shutter and aperture and go with Auto ISO and hope DE-NOISE will make it good in post
I remember, from the 80’s, Bob Ross, the famous painter used to say… “We don’t make mistakes, we have ‘happy accidents!’ “ - it’s a great way of thinking!
Some of my ‘happy accidents’ have turned out as nice artistic abstract-style images!
I've learned to shoot scenes at varying focal lengths to get the image I want although sometimes I still fail to do this. The big one, however, is over editing. I now never finish an image without letting it sit in Lightroom while I do something else for a couple of hours at least. Just the other day I did this and found that there was way too much red in a shot taken at sunset. Thanks Nigel for all the great videos. Can't wait to see images from your trip with Mads and James.
We went to Hawaii last fall and didn't really understand the drone as well as I should have. Great photos but missed tthe best shots. Will fix that on the next trip in a month. Lots of practice this summer.
Smirking, my British friends tell me the F is for Fine, in Read the Fine Manual (RTFM) and I did that repeatedly. As a principle, Nigel, you are totally right. In the way our teachers told us that, if/when they woke us up in the middle of the night and asked question X, we should automatically respond the answer to X, we must in the same way understand our cameras.
So I actually created an Excel of all the menus that retains the structure in the camera, can be sorted in another way and later arranged back in camera order again [1].
With that I can easily group, say, AF subjects. Does that help, out there? No. I still need to remember the logic of why part of AF is in one chapter and another is in another chapter.
The problem with these guides is that they are definitions in large part and often "tautologies".
An electronic camera has an On/Off switch and what does the reference guide say: this is the On/Off switch. Tautology. Zero added value. What it leaves implicit is, "if you want to use this device you better switch it on."
Aussie BIF [2] shooter Jan Wegener in one of his videos discusses a Z 9 or 8, and complains about lenses AF hunting. Then he presents a workaround that works well. There are limitations that nobody (influencers) talks about. AF may work down to, say, -4 EV, but eye recognition may need more than 4 EV (8 EV less sensitive).
[1] I feel that Nikon could have added a menu export function to their camera menus that exports all menu choices into a .csv file or so and potentially can be imported into another camera.
[2] Birds In Flight
One of my constant mistakes to make - and I did it again this morning - is to not check my camera settings before I start photographing. I did a birthday session last evening, had the camera in AF-C with ISO between 400 to 800 and forgot to reset before going out to the beach this morning. Well, I don't have to tell you what happened! 🤦♂😄. Lesson learned: always check your settings OR just program a user setting (Nikon).
Thanks Nigel for reminding us that it's normal to make a mistake once in awhile. I made a big one about a week ago. I shoot some live music as well as my landscape. Last week I shot one of my bucket list people and I didn't check my camera well enough and I shot the whole thing in jpg which I would NEVER do. I'm not even sure how it got set for that. I was deeply embarassed and managed to pull enough images from the shots. I will add that setting to my pre-show checklist now.
... short video, but very informative... a few weeks ago i started wildlife photography, after 4th-5th shooting i decided to go with auto-iso, there is nothing more annoying then blurred photo of moving animal...
I often tend to shoot the wrong focal length rather than changing lenses to get to the right focal length. But the mistake I make most often is to forget to switch image stabilization off or on as the camera goes on or off the tripod...especially bad when you wind up handheld without IS. I've created checklists to try to eliminate some of the errors I make. All these things happen while hurrying. Funny thing regarding the photos from other photographers that you put up as not over-edited: I felt that at least two of the three were quite overcooked.
I think it's good that manufacturers are making lenses that automatically turn off their IS while on a tripod these days. They help me a lot.
@@thegrayyernaut Interesting, what manufacturers?
Thanks for sharing Nigel, I saw on Twitter you were also at the volcano so I wondered when we'd seen footage of that on youtube. Bummer for the unintended manual focus. Heat diffraction made for a hard time focussing. Even with the right focus distance that image can be blurry with the intense heat. I found another reason the autofocus of my drone wasn't working: flying too close to lava ;-)
Just came back from a bucket list trip to the Faroes, and while there I of course took a series of images from the Gasadalur waterfall at sunset, and had a failure moment that hurt. To get an idea of how a bracketed and edited image would look, I took an HDR image on my Canon RP. Looked nice. Switched back to my preferred manual mode and shot a half hour worth of brackets in JPEG! Forgot that the auto HDR mode changes the camera to JPEG. Promptly ruined 95% of the images until discovered the error just before last images. Able to save 1 bracket, but all the ones with better clouds and light were lost! I WILL NEVER FORGET TO CHANGE BACK TO RAW AFTER AUTO HDR NOW!!! 🤐
As frustrating as it is, I also think failure is important in the process of learning. Last week I was at the Mondial Air Balloons in France (a huge gathering of hot air balloons), and wanted to make a timelapse of the inflations. My camera was ready on tripod, focused, then I realized my tripod was touching the fences where kids were playing. To avoid any shaking visible on the timelapse, I stopped the shooting, moved my tripod 10cm away then turned back my camera on and continued the automatic shooting. Unfortunately the focus moved a bit while restarting it, so my whole footage is blurry...
Over-editing is also something I realize when I see some old edits of mine. It could be interesting to see more of your editing evolution!
When we don’t fail, we don’t learn. I am into photography for about 45 years now and still there are mistakes to be made… mostly I am not happy with either the perspective chosen or shooting at higher iso (+1600) … but for that I am to lazy to take a tripod with me (most of the times). Like in Belgium last year on the beach: great light before nightfall but no tripod. So I had to improvise with my bag🤫but then I have to remember like what in velvia50 days I always did: taking a Monopod with me.
It’s even a great support when hiking. (At least it could help in some situations) And even if it’s clumsy and heavier: I do prefer fixed to zoom-lenses. So I mostly walk two camera bodies, lenses attached, and one or two longer lenses in the bag - 24 or 28, 40, 90&135mm or when shooting light the 40mm or a medium-format and the 80mm. Always good light!!
I have done most of these but my most persistent mistake is forgetting to check that the memory cards are in the camera😕 Also I just finished your Luskentyre book. It is fantastic and the biggest surprise are the abstract photos at the end of it-they are truly magical. Thanks for all your efforts!
Hahaha I do this all the time. One time went with two cameras and ….
Thanks for the tips!
Enjoyed the video as usual Nigel.
You must have been gutted when you saw your drone image's out of focus.
The drone footage of the volcano was amazing and probably something that you would treasure as you witnessed it first hand.
Very interesting points in the video especially focusing.
The times that i have taken a shot using back button focus and then gone to take another shot a few seconds later and forgot to press the back button again, i have lost count lol.
Look forward to seeing your next video.
That "overedited" is what instagram consists of. especially the sites that "promotes" locations.
Nigel you mentioned your settings when shooting with high shutter speeds as using shutter speed and auto ISO. This often gives results with dark subjects against bright backgrounds for instance. I shoot manual shutter and aperture with auto ISO as well but one control you did not mention was exposure compensation. It makes for better starting images with auto ISO if you can quickly change exposure on the fly with an eye to the histogram.
Butch
My biggest problem is trusting the camera. I try to shoot in manual as much as possible and believe the shutter speed corrector. Most times it doesn't turn out right snd the shot is out of focus. So, I then shoot in iA, the shots look better, but the main difference is the high ISO its using. Onwards and upwards.
Oh man... Mine was at Capelinhos Volcano, Azores... I had perfect conditions for some astrophotography.
My A7iv has double slots for sd cards, so I usually shoot redundant. But my card got full just after sunset, and I started using the 2nd card... except you need to configure shooting raw for both cards... all, yes, ALL of my astrophotography photos are JPEGs. I couldn't believe the next day 😅
I don't have auto focus bracketing in my camera, and that's my biggest issue. Often I think I have everything in focus, only to find out when I get home that I don't. My second biggest issue is editing. Editing is hard since there isn't really a right or wrong way, and you can go so many different ways with a single photo. I always try to edit as little as possible, to stay true to what I actually experienced in the field. But it's so tempting to rock all the sliders in the post processing software 🤷♂️
Short, Sharp and extremely thoughtful and useful. i now do a number of camera checks before I place it in my camera back before even heading out. Batteries charged, Cards clean and loaded, basic camera settings for intended shoot. Minimise failures "“If You Fail to Plan, You Are Planning to Fail” - Benjamin Franklin."
Thank you!
Good video Nigel. I would add learn to see mistakes as an opportunity to learn, and not to be scared to make mistakes, as that's how we improve as a person and in our photography skills. However making the same mistake over and over is inexcusable ;)
I still have trouble telling if something is in focus, even when checking. Also, I'm not much of an expert on lenses. I have mostly used a zoom and a wide angle zoom, but just got a 50mm (used) and it's a whole new game. It wasn't focusing close up, so I need to find out if there's a minimum distance, or maybe the lens isn't working right.
I guess this is my biggest struggle. What helps me is using manual focus and a setting on A6000 that puts the areas in focus in yellow color.
Of all the things to check first before you throw up a drone, focus seems to be the one thing I forget frequently.
… once again, but I am looking for some proper filters/ holder. Could you recommend some/one, please? Always good light!
Great video. Could you please do more videos focused on drone specific photography?
I wonder if the foreground image issue at 5:22 might have worked better if you had gotten lower, and made those stones much more prominent. I can see I think you were trying to have the stones lead up to the trees. Maybe a lower elevation would have made that more explicit?
I wish your masterclass videos were available to buy as individual modules. I'm sure they are all brilliant, but it's a lot of money if want an editing course just for woodland photography.
Your points about focal length and crop or zoom and foreground are all valid and relevant but you miss the one buzzword: perspective. Perspective is determined by camera-subject distance, angle between optical axis and subject, and height relative to horizon.
And the examples you use to illustrate your points ar mostly about perspective. I learnt this in perspective drawing art class, in theory, that I could apply in a drawing, but I only really learnt to "see" it after 10,000 conscious photographs and that's a lot with film photography - the brain was trained. All of a sudden I saw photos in my head before I took them, including what the effect (image angle) of focal length would be and perspective it would give at the certain distance. So this also enabled me to imagine an image and its perspective from a different camera position. That imagination is not perfect but I'd say 80% confidence level. It means I can walk around without looking through my camera and find the position, perspective, that gives the desired result.
Or in the case of a portrait, I can ask the sitter to move to a slightly different position that may be a bit more flattering, relative to their imperfections.
This is not to brag, just to underline the point you make, Nigel, and to repeat that we cannot train the brain by watching videos or reading books or looking at photographs of other photographers.
There's no substitute for repetition, and DIY.
Nigel, It’s funny about how you are talking about knowing your camera. I just switched from Sony to Nikon Z7ii and I am struggling in trying to set it up and most importantly as you said to take AE BKT handheld and focus stack. Do you a reference guide that you could share to get me started. Thank you for the informative videos
Well, at least you didn’t sacrifice the drone to the volcano Nigel.
Stay safe 🇦🇺
I had a quick question for you. I take alot of landscape photos in the mountains. When I take the picture everything looks great however sometimes there is a white haze that I can not get rid of at the base or the middle of the mountain.
I'll use the dehaze tool to touch it up but I can only get rid of about 30% of it.
Do you have any tips on getting rid of it or some sort of tip on how to negate it when I take the photo.
Unfortunately Nigel the newer cameras that do the auto focus stacking are out of reach for the average Joe, so I have to continue to do it manually
Make a video on how to print a large photo correctly and frame it.
What I would say(and not trying to sound like a smart arse) is shoot like a professional! When I was working in a pro capacityI would be on an event or shoot, I’d always make time to go through my settings, if you know your gear well you can learn to do this in probably 10-20 seconds, the point about shooting like a pro is one can not afford to mess up ! If you make a special trip or set aside time for a shoot making fundamental mistakes can be a total disaster, money wise and reputation wise! To travel to say Iceland then realise when you get home you had made mistakes which could have been avoided by using that vital twenty seconds to check things on location would be maddening. If one is an amateur, hobbyist or pro taking care and working as if a pro can literally save the day! 😀👍👏
First month learning about photography, went on a trip and took tons of landscape photos, wondering why people don't just always shoot at F22 to make sure their entire landscape is in focus all the time...... ugh...... surprise, not a lot of sharpness, just a lot of homogenous fuzzy outlines.... gah! Lesson learned.
Most of my biggest mistakes have always been related to focus
perhaps on small prints/viewing devices slightly out of focus images are fine, and good enough to keep memories and documenting the place, or....maybe some clever AI can rescue some of them ...
Ah yeah.. The foreground... One of the biggest challenges for me.
Over-editing - the photos from other photographers you use to illustrate the point and say they edited a lot but not too much ... I think your Yosemite shot is a lot better than theirs. Theirs look over-edited, HDR and to some extent fake. Theirs is a style I really don't like.
The sky darker is wrong? I sailed a boat through wetlands with reed as far as you could see. The sky was overcast with dark, dark clouds. Behind me the clouds had broken open and sun shone through. The view was magical, with the reeds and water in sunlight under a threatening dark sky. I would imagine with the time you spend outdoors in British landscapes and British climate, you have seen this many a time. It's real, Nigel. And magical, but you need to find the right perspective to work with it ;)
“By seeking and blundering we learn.”― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 👍🥂
Simple mistake that ruined quite a few shots. Was shooting an indoor concert in incandescent light and not adjusting the white balance for the light and then leaving it on auto iso. A majority of the resulting images were utterly unusable they were so noisy that I couldn’t fix in post… iso pegged up well above 18k even though I was using an f2.8 lens opened all the way up… was very disappointing.. got really nervous I was blowing shots so made the worse choice of setting it on “P” mode for several images for fear of missing moments.. even worse decision! Realized the errors and at least corrected them so as not to lose everything but it was a harsh reminder to confirm settings with test shots beforehand…
Peppermint oil for lip. Works magic
My common mistake is not checking whether my photos are well leveled. Not that I don't know how (and my camera helps me), I just forget to check😢.
A sharp image is better than a noisy image, you say. You mean something else. A noisy (grainy) sharp image is better than a blurry image without noise. My thoughts go out to Kodak Tri-X (B&W negative film) and its "lovely" grain and sharp images with that.
Tri-X pushed ASA 800! I loved that look.
@@martharetallick204 - I used Diafine and went higher (35mm). My preference was the 120 film, sometimes in Rodinal, or else HC110 (IIRC) probably most in D76.
I get caught once in a while when I forget to turn bracketing off. Ex. I may have had it on in an early shoot. Later I take a photo and check it and it looks fine but the next two shots are over and under exposed.
My most common mistake is forgetting I've got a polarising filter on the lens! It's not the end of the world but you end up with a bit more work in Lightroom later.....
Yeah guilty of going too wide! Biggest mistake that I keep making is getting to a location too late and I end up chasing the light.
Oh, this mistakes! It an happen, that I use the Z8 with the wrong shooting menu. And then I wonder, why I cannot find the histogramm on my screen.
My latest mistake was that I somehow got my Z9 switched from RAW to JPEG and did not check settings before starting a day of photography in Yellowstone. I did not catch the mistake for several days, so I had some valuable images, that were compromised. I have no idea how the switch got made because I never intentionally shoot in JPEG. Also, I could not get my camera to return to RAW and ended up having to reset the entire camera and go through the laborious process of re-configuring all my settings.
Biggest fail: forgetting my memory card when going out to shoot a sunset. Nothing dramatic in the end, but I realized I only got three braincells and two are on vacation.
The messed up detail only I know about and nobody else notices it but it keeps me up at night: Taking an epic 20 picture panorama from a hike in the french Alps, stitching it together when back home only to realize one of the pictures is kinda blurry because I probably didn´t wait the 2 seconds for my camera to stop shaking and wobbeling after adjusting the camera on the tripod. Now I have a beautiful panorama but when you look closely you can see a vertical stripe that is blurry while the rest is crisp sharp. It´s so small you really have to look for it but it jumps at me every time I look at the picture.
Not reviewing image in the field and missing the chance to correct obvious composition error. Usually because taking too many shots and not focussing on capturing fewer but better quality images.
Mistakes: run out of battery; white balance (somehow) set on flash mode; brought the wrong lens; oh so many mistakes I can't count them!
My most common mistake is forgetting to charge my batteries. Dumb mistake but I do it all the time.
Well, you're still holding your drone after shooting an active volcano, so it obviously wasn't that bad of a mistake. Maybe returning from location with useless footage is worse; it's debatable.
For myself, maybe not paying close enough attention to the entire frame, with the idea in mind that I can crop or edit out in post. That generally hasn't been my style, coming from a film/journalistic background, but the "fix in post" mindset can lead to some bad habits.
My biggest mistake is trusting the camera and not double checking the focus.
Lack of focus bracketing makes me want to leave Sony. Anyway, thanks for another video!
Biggest mistake: Prepare and check photo equipment, outdoor equipment and individual needs BEFORE the photo shoot.
If a photographer likes his photo its not a mistake. If one stranger likes his photo, it's not a mistake.
I still forget to switch between AF-S and AF-C and it messes up my focus a number of times that I can't count anymore. :v
Thanks Nigel 😊
Was it just me, or did you seem a bit more rushed in this video? Your usual calmness was missing. Hope you're alright.
I forget to turn image stabilization off when using a tripod😢
Excellent content, as always!
You deserve all your subscribers.
I'd be happy if I could get even 10% of them :D
Focus peaking not photo stacking
I felt personally triggered by all of these. 🙂
All rule of thirds your teaching, if a person can't get that naturally they'll never take good photos.
Disagree - sorry!