The 7 Photography Mistakes I See All Photographers do! (2)

a big thank you to Salt digital for sponsoring this week's video stay around to get a big discount on your next Photography book this video is a followup to my most popular video on my channel in the last seven years in this video I want to help you avoid seven of the biggest mistakes I always see in landscape photography and let's just jump straight into the first one and that is not leaving enough breathing room for the elements in your photo and what do I mean by that so if you look here here and here we have very very close to the edge of the frame the elements just don't have enough breathing room here is the original Crop and you can either crop it too much in postprocessing or you may not frame the photo properly when you're in the field so if you want a number I usually leave 10 to 15% of the frame without much detail like here and here you can have detail coming in from the edges for sure but everything of Interest I usually leave in the middle of the frame with 10 to 15% not used likewise here not enough space in the top and in the bottom and here is a crop where you have the breathing room same goes for this example with the birds here's the original Crop I actually had some birds up here in the original Crop but I cloned them out because I found them to be too close to the edge in this example here I have actually cropped this down from a larger photo and you can see there are actually trees here and here but I do accept them sticking out of the frame simply just because they're part of the lines in the photo so they are part of the line of trees that come in and shape the shapes of this photo so in this particular case I find it acceptable that they are here generally just remember that it is much easier to crop afterwards than to extend a frame if you do not frame the photo properly in the field if in doubt zoom out the next mistake to avoid is to have too much or irrelevant midg ground that often becomes dead space in your photos so in this example here with the church from Slovenia I have this Stone here in front and then I have quite a big midg ground right here I should have been a little bit further down and a little bit closer to this Stone to make it a little bit more impactful foreground yet not take away from the church but this big mid-ground section here is just a bit me likewise in this photo I did think that I wanted all these snowy mounts so I brought in this Mount down here as a kind of a foreground but it is just not impactful and it falls in with the midg ground and the midg ground is just too big and too messy before it leads your eye up to the tree up here now I also have a problem over here but that's you already learned about in the previous video but here the midr is just big blah and in this example I tried to bring in this foreground but I had way too much midg ground up below this tree right here so what I did was I moved a little bit closer and then I brought in the foreground here it's a much more impactful foreground but I don't have all this mid-ground as in the previous photo right here but I'm not entirely sure that I actually like this foreground that much even though it does have this line thing going on so maybe just leave out the immediate foreground and just have the foreground here with the snow and then the tree right there and if you want to learn much more about all these compositional tools be sure to get my eBooks on exactly that topic they are super easy to read they do not have a whole lot of text and that's because I believe that that's the only way you can actually get through those ebooks I personally know that if I pick up a book and there's too much text in it it takes me forever to get through it if I ever get through it both ebooks cover nine different compositional tools they have plenty of examples and in the last chapter I bring everything together and analyze some of my own photos so you can see what I actually mean there are links to both ebooks down description of this video the next mistake to avoid is using the tripod too much and especially when it's not really necessary it is easy to see all us professional photographers using our tripods all the time and thinking that it's a necessity to use tripod a tripod is a fantastic tool for holding your camera still and as you've seen on my channel I often use the tripod and I actually use it more than what I need for my photography but that's only because I need something to hold the camera while I make my videos and explain to you guys what I'm doing the tripod is of course good once you found your composition and you want to bracket your photos or take several exposures and blend them together generally during low light where you need to compensate for the lack of light with a longer exposure either during the early or late hours of the day during night or when you actually aim for a long exposure by using neutral density filters however a tripod can also very much be in the way and hassle to use and if I don't need the tripod then I definitely avoid it because it allows me to think react and change composition much faster especially if you're photographing from a very low angle or in snow the tripod can easily end up being in the way a tripod is a tool that can help you in certain situations while it's redundant in other the next mistake is to not spend enough time on location I find that the strongest red colors in the sky often happen half an hour before sunrise and after Sunset however I also find that I do get a significant amount of my favorite photos from Sunrise shoots just after the golden hour if I only aimed for exactly when the Sun rises I would miss out on many great opportunities likewise on days with changing weather those days where showers comes and goes and you get many breaks in the clouds where the sun comes out it's hard to predict what will actually happen on Days like those so it is better to spend more time out and jump on the opportunities when they happen an example of that was when Nel James and I climbed Castle crack in the Lake District because we spent so much time out and endured the showers we got many opportunities for great photos same story when I was in the Pharaohs during these winter conditions we spent hours in the same location just waiting for the weather to change and it gave a whole range of different amazing photos if you like me also like to preserve your memories when you're out photographing you can right now get a big discount on a professional line photo book from Sal digital now I use this line of photo books each year to make a portfolio book from my previous year but you can also use them for wedding photography albums photo portfolio albums or whatever else you can come up with you can easily design them through the Sal digital drag and drop software Ware the software comes with different templates but you can of course also just make your own you can choose different kinds of paper I personally go with the glossy paper because I think it works very well with my photos as you can see the pages are lay flat which means that they are completely flat and that works really well if you want to like print one large panoramic photo or at the very least a photo that covers both Pages you can also choose different front page designs as you can also see there are no logos foral digital anywhere so in that way you can just make it completely your own photo book now one thing that has surprised me so much is just how accurate the image quality is with these prints there's a reason why they call it the professional line photo book it's just nailed each time at least in my experience you still do need to know how to accurately produce your photos finish your photos and there are many videos about that on YouTube but once you have done that I personally find that I do not need the ICC profiles which is a service salel provides but I honestly don't need it and finally you can get these gifted boxes that I find to be really good for protecting the albums but they also look super athetic and just use the links down in the description of of this video to get the discount so the fifth mistake is to not keep your camera back packed and ready the first problem that occurs if you don't do that is that you cannot react fast if something interesting happens in your local neighborhood and you want to go out and photograph it oh boy so there I were just sitting doing whatever I do every evening in front of the computer and being like ah nice evening I look out the window and it's going to go Kaboom so just look at this look at this guy oh boy oh boy secondly you will 110% sure forget either your SD cards or your batteries or something else that you have not packed if you're in a hurry to get out at some point it will happen that you forget something super important and thirdly it can actually become a burden that you have to pack everything first before going out the door you can set the night before uh I don't want to pack my gear even though I want to go out and photograph in the morning and then you may end up not actually going out and if you don't go out you don't get the photos so of course I don't have all my gear packed in my backpack all the time I usually have all the most important stuff like SD cards extra batteries the camera that I actually use my most used lenses lens cloths and so forth and of course have a tripod attached to the camera back each time else I would definitely forget it so the sixth mistake and let's talk about editing I know editing is highly highly subjective if I do not say that and make disclaimers I would get a whole host of comments from people who refuse to edit their photos saying that it's cheating but fact of the matter is a raw photo is not and has never been a representation of reality if you want your photos so they look like reality you will have to edit them if you want to go gho with your editing then by all means do so it's your photos not someone else's not some middle management photographers who have a lot of P about photography it's your photos you can do with them what you want however when all this is said and done there are generally some editing mistakes that you want to avoid and we as a photography Community seems to have some kind of collective taste where most of us can agree about what is aesthetically pleasing editing and what is not aesthetically pleasing editing it's what some philosophers would call inter subjectivity but my main point is that you want to avoid under editing your photos just as much as you want to avoid over editing your photos it's about finding that good middle ground so a photo does not have to pop but contrast does help to make it more interesting whether this is color contrast or tonal contrast here are a few different photos after editing and compared to the raw file the raw files are just flat and boring in this photo literally captured out the front window of a bus the raw photo was fairly flat so I gave it a good amount of editing and now I find it to work much better this is not to say that I couldn't have edited it in some other way I just preferred this at that time a second point for under editing your photos is not cleaning them properly remove distractions whether that's dust spots lens vignetting or Twix sticking out of the snow or a cloud that's annoyingly distracting and speaking of clouds a third pointer in this example we had some gorgeous strong shower clouds one even produced a water sprout and the clouds I captured in the Raw photo were quite flat and boring too so I really had to do some editing to bring out the details in the clouds but trying my best not to overedit the photo and take too much attention away from myself and the reflection in the middle of the photo and if you want to learn how I edit photos exactly like this be sure to enroll in my big Photoshop for landscape photographers postprocessing course here I go through the programs so you learn them properly then I cover all sorts of different editing tools in the last segment I have 11 start to finish tutorials that cover a whole range of different landscape photos that you can capture for yourself there is a coupon code so you can save a little bit of money along with a link down in the description of this video so the seventh mistake or just seventh thing you need to be aware of as a landscape photographer is a very very hard thing to do it's more or less actually the hardest thing to do as a landscape photographer and in lack of better words it is not capturing the X Factor of a photo it is that factor that is hard to put into words but make the photo stand out from all the other photos when describing X Factor it's usually that one funny thing about the photo or the unique thing about the photo or that one thing that gives the viewer the dopamine kick where like oh yeah the thing that they actually react to and it's not so much about capturing the moment because you can certainly get that X Factor in your photos with some patience and timing but it can be hard to find or work out and it's often down to dump luck either because the perfect moment happens in front of you or you stumble upon something very interesting in this example it's the bubbles in the foreground and reflection of the mountain in the eyes in this it's the perfect moment when the birds fly above the boat and here it's simply the perfect Lone Tree and snow in combination with an aperture that makes the foreground snow slightly out of focus bringing out that Bokey glitter in this example it's the unique setting of a lone black church here the cluster of trees engulfed in fog and a big cloud behind in this photo it's me standing on top of this triangular-shaped mountain with the uniformly layered mountains in the background separated by the light and atmosphere here the eye contact with the wall Ross straight in the middle of the photo and the reflection of the walrus in the water and lastly here how the foreground Dunes in combination with the background Milky Way creates an S curve through the photo so as you can see it's not so much much about capturing the perfect moment it is also about actually working the composition in the field and also be sure to subscribe to my newsletter it is where I announce workshops new products news I weekly give you a notification on new video uploads and it is my direct line to you guys out there in case YouTube or Instagram blows up or something like that there's a link to it down in the description if you want to learn much more be sure to get my eBooks on in landscape photography enroll in my big Photoshop for landscape photographers postprocessing course subscribe to my newsletter I hope you learned a lot thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Mads Peter Iversen

Views: 180,872

Keywords: photography, landscape photography, photography for beginners, photography mistakes, photography tips, photography tips for beginners, improve your photography, photography basics, photography composition, how to photography, photography tutorials, photography tutorials for beginners, landscape photography tutorial, photography what to know, how to landscape photography, 7 photography mistakes, landscape photography mistakes, Beginner photography, pro photography

Id: UJAOzEDTQFM

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024