Mistakes, second chances, and things forgotten (part one)

In photography, it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later.

If you’re not interrogating your own past work, you’re missing out on endless inspiration. And while the adage that ‘your first 10,000 photographs are your worst’ is endlessly quoted, it’s important to realise the improvement this implies is not a passive process.

Sure, your eye for composition will naturally get better with time, but like any muscle, it speeds up the process if you actively train it.

This is doubly true for matters of the craft that go beyond mere composition – the technical stuff that no matter how smart the cameras get, will always be down to you as the operator.

What’s surprising though is there’s no short of lessons to be found in your own back catalogue, and I find that those lessons can generally be grouped into three categories. These are: mistakes (things I see I got wrong), second chances (things I see can be improved upon), and things forgotten (things I got right and I am reminded of).

So, let’s dive into a few of mine!

The mistakes

1) Not exposing to preserve highlights

If I had to name a single change to my photographic technique that has most consistently yielded better and more usable images over time it is this: exposing to preserve highlights.

While we often hear you should ‘expose to the right’ of the histogram, in practice what I’ve discovered is that blown highlights are generally a bigger danger than blocked-up shadows.

Shooting RAW rather than JPEG will give you better latitude to adjust both shadows and highlights in post-processing, but a bit of shadow that’s ‘lost’ to pure black is generally less offensive in most images than a section of sky that’s burned to a pure white blob.

I’ve shot mirrorless for years, and combining the in-viewfinder histogram with the exposure compensation dial to ensure that the histogram isn’t ‘off the scale’ to the right has helped ensure that my high-contrast scenes don’t end up as write-offs.

2) Dramatically over-processing

Photographic printing has always been subjective, way back to the days of Ansel Adams. Nonetheless, it’s always possible to over-process.

My first published photos were shot with a Nikon D90 and edited on an early Intel Atom netbook while backpacking across Asia.

I was drunk with power, and sometimes went too far. Call it the ‘Instagram filter effect’, and none of us are immune to it.

Over-processing, of course, means different things to different people, and there are no doubt purists reading this article who will think I’m still guilty of it (I disagree, but fair play!).

Nonetheless, there’s a point – whether through too much saturation, too much contrast, or heavy use of vignettes or other effects – where a photograph ceases to properly resemble reality.

And when you hit that point, everyone will notice, and not in a good way.

Before you hit export on those images, it’s always a good idea to do a quick reality check. Are you drunk with power? Have you wandered too far from reality? Consider dialling it back.

3) Not learning technical night photography

Night photography is slow, time-consuming, and largely an exercise in trial and error. Batteries die with multiple long exposures (especially in the cold) and you spend plenty of time composing shots that just end up blurry, or underexposed. It’s a crapshoot.

Nonetheless it gets better with practice. You can (and definitely should) read up on night photography technique, but there’s no substitute for committing yourself to a session and carefully assessing the results on your monitor afterwards.

It’s one of the few situations I can think of where you might shoot for an hour and end up with no keeper images, but seeing why an image didn’t work is invaluable learning too.

In doing this process myself I’ve discovered a host of errors to look for and correct the next time out. For example, using too high an ISO will result in an unusably noisy image, while selecting an ISO that’s low (but not too low) will allow me to bring up the shadows in post-processing enough to give them a satisfying bit of detail.

The lessons you’ll learn are too numerous to list, and you’ll no doubt discover them yourself. Time is the real teacher: the more you laboriously practice this challenging part of the craft, the better you’ll get.  

Look out for part two next week.