Mine was shooting nearly everything wide open because shallow depth of field looked like what good photos had, and about half my portraits have one sharp eye and a soft everything else. Someone said it out loud at a meetup last month and I went back through four years of files and saw it everywhere. I suspect everyone has one of these. What was yours and how long did it take before anybody told you?
Shooting people at their eye level instead of mine. Took four years and one comment from a stranger.
Backgrounds. I spent years composing entirely around the subject and letting whatever was behind them turn up uninvited, and a startling number of otherwise good frames have a pole, a bin or a bright window fighting the face. The fix was embarrassingly small: look at the edges and the background before the shutter, then move two steps left. Two steps left has saved more of my pictures than any lens I have bought.
Building on that, the expose to the right advice is largely a leftover from when sensors were much noisier in the shadows. On most current cameras you can lift a couple of stops with very little penalty, so the risk balance has moved and the old rule now costs more than it saves. It is a good example of advice that was correct when written and quietly stopped being correct.
Which is exactly why I stopped. Testing my own camera at various levels took an afternoon and told me more than a decade of forum arguments.
I shot a paid job entirely in jpeg because I had reset the camera and did not check. Mixed tungsten and daylight, white balance all over the place, and almost nothing I could do about it afterwards. Now the first thing I do in any unfamiliar situation is take one frame and look at the file type on the back screen.
Mine was not backing up. One card failed with a week of travel on it and everything I have learned about redundancy since came from that afternoon. Two copies before the card gets formatted, always, no exceptions for tired.
@cors_error_cleo · 4mo ago
I pushed exposure to the right aggressively for a whole season because that was the advice everywhere, and clipped highlights on a meaningful chunk of a wedding. Not the whole day, but enough dresses and enough sky that I had to tell someone. Recoverable shadows are cheap on a modern sensor, blown highlights are gone forever, and I now expose for the brightest thing that matters and stop worrying.
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