Want to boost your photography skills? Bypass the newbie stage with our top ten tips for shooting like the professionals.

Photo: Pixabay – No, not the zoom!

1- Zoom lenses

Sure, they’re convenient, but due to the compromise in image quality they often entail, zoom lenses are rarely recommended even at the best of times. Yet there’s another, perhaps more important, reason why you should avoid zooms: they can promote laziness. Taking a portrait but can’t get everything you want in the frame? Just zoom out to a wider setting, right?

Wrong.

Better to use your legs. The focal length of your lens should ideally be chosen because it gives you the desired optical result, not just because you can’t be bothered to take two steps back.

Photo: Pixabay – No, not the zoom!You’d never think of employing such a trashy gimmick, right? Thought not.

2- Filter-Frenzy

Another common novice mistake is thinking that the use of a few classy filters will turn an otherwise totally uninteresting photo into an artistic masterpiece. Instead, what the rest of us see is merely a boring photo with some gratuitously applied filters. Filters have their legitimate uses, but get the image looking great in the camera and you won’t need to do much in the way of post-processing.

Photo: Pixabay – There’s a time and place for narrow depth-of-field…

3- Inappropriate Aperture

The aperture you set on your lens dictates more than just the amount of light hitting the sensor, it also affects depth-of-field (how much or little of the image is sharp in front of and behind the point of focus). Depth of field is a creative tool. If the background is cluttered and messy you may want to throw it out of focus by using a small aperture in order to emphasize the subject. Conversely, if you’re photographing a wide scene such as a landscape, where foreground and background information is likely to be of equal importance, a tiny aperture and minimal depth of field will look terrible, giving little sharp detail for the eye to settle upon.

4- Inconsistency

One day you’re Sebastiao Salgado, the next day you’re David LaChapelle. Of course, the idea that we all have a ‘true’, fixed personality might be something of myth – so this isn’t necessarily about ‘finding yourself’ – but when you group together a series of images, even if these are just for uploading to social media, you are creating a body of work and this body of work should hold together in some way. Be that aesthetically or conceptually. Make a bold, confident and coherent statement, not a series of disjointed grunts.

Photo: Pixabay – What’s this photo about?

Photo: Pixabay- Ahhh! Well why didn’t you say so?

5- Concentrate on the Action

What’s the photograph ‘about’? What are the essential elements of the ‘story’ you’re trying to tell? Move closer, get in where the action is, and exclude everything superfluous from the frame. Your photo should be a hard punch that homes in on only the most essential elements of the scene to leave the viewer in no doubt as to your intentions, not a weedy, indecisive and noncommittal whisper in the wind. Remember that merely a small part of a person or object will often do the same narrative job as the whole. For example, it might be essential that the viewer understands that there’s a second person present in the photo, but we don’t necessarily need to see the whole of that person in the frame in order to make sense of the story: merely a hand and bit of forearm might tell us all we need to know.

6 – Form over Content

Just because something or someone is depicted in a photograph doesn’t automatically mean they become interesting. A photograph that is not ‘about’ anything, but rather just a pretty composition of light and form, tells us nothing important about the world we live in. Always try to make photos that have something meaningful to say.

7- Editing

While clearly not unique to Millennials, the habit of sharing every single banal moment of our lives on social media has perhaps made us less likely to be selective about the images we show to the world. When you look through the viewfinder and select the right moment to press the shutter, you are editing. This process should also continue after capture. Every photographer – even the masters you idolize – will take bad photos from time to time. The difference between you and the pros? Great photographers keep their mistakes hidden. You should too. Edit, edit, edit.

Photo: Pixabay. Somebody just bought a new fish-eye lens!

8- Mega Wide-Angle Lenses

Wide-angle lenses of course have their legitimate uses, but reaching for one purely in the hope of making an otherwise rather boring scene look more dynamic is not one of them. Once again, if you need to rely upon tricks such as this then you should probably ask yourself if it’s really a photo worth taking in the first place.

9- Underexposure

You already know that turning up the ISO dial will likely result in increased digital noise, so you avoid it unless really necessary, right? Great! However, bear in mind that noise can often be reduced in post-processing, whereas there’s little that can be done to salvage a severely underexposed image. Higher ISO settings exist for a reason. Sometimes you’ll need to use them.

10- Unwanted Blur

Blur has it’s place in the creative photographer’s kitbag, but only when desired and controlled. If you think you’ve captured a winning image, always be sure to zoom in on the LCD to check for sharpness before moving on. When it comes to holding a camera steady at slow shutter speeds, every photographer will have a different level of ability. Identify the point where your capacity to stay stock-still ends and camera-shake begins, and avoid going below this shutter speed. Remember, keep your elbows in and slowly exhale as you press the shutter. Lean against a wall or other firm object for extra support. And if that doesn’t do the trick then you might want to bring a tripod next time.