Stop Playing By The Rules – And You’ll Become A Better Photographer

Stop Playing By The Rules - And You'll Become A Better Photographer

If you read this article over at Popular Photography you will notice it’s possible to break some of the rules we’ve been told over and over again.

Actually, I would even recommend breaking them every once in awhile, just to make sure you’ll keep your photography fresh and outside the box.

1. A good exposure has a bell-curve-shaped histogram.

Break it: The shape of the graph doesn’t actually tell you whether exposure is “good” or not, just how tones are distributed. For instance, proper exposure for a dark backlit scene, with just a fringe of light and very few midtones, will have a histogram that resembles an inverted bell curve.

Although you should generally avoid overexposure of highlights (a histogram bulky on the right side) and underexposure of shadows (bulky on the left), this isn’t always so. In that backlit scene, keeping the highlights from overexposing will likely give you a dark image with some shadows ending up as pure black.

2. Shoot in manual for better exposure control.

Break it: While there might be some learning value for beginners, manual mode doesn’t have any practical advantage over the easier-to-use—and more intuitive— aperture- and shutter-priority autoexposure modes. In fact, we’ve seen countless shooters struggling to find the proper settings using manual, while their autoexposing counterparts get the shot before fleeting conditions change.

Think of aperture and shutter priority as speed manual: You set just one variable, and the camera will set the other based on the meter reading. If you don’t like how it looks, you can brighten or darken it with the exposure-compensation control.

When shooting landscapes, we almost always shoot with aperture priority, because f-stop is often non-negotiable—when we need f/16 for sufficient depth of field, for example. For wildlife, the converse is usually true: Shutter speed is usually crucial.

3. Customize your white balance before every shot.

Break it: Using a gray card or white-balance cube to set the “correct” white balance for a nature photo is not only impractical, it imposes a rigid standard onto a subjective, artistic decision. While ensuring a neutral color balance makes sense for situations where color fidelity is paramount, this is not often the case with nature photography. In fact, certain color casts—the blues of dawn and dusk, or the warm hues of sunset—create mood and inject emotional content into the image. Setting a custom white balance during a sunset shoot will only remove the magic quality of the light that attracted you to the scene in the first place.

And if you shoot in RAW format, you can easily set white balance during the processing stage without compromising image quality. This lets you tweak it precisely on a calibrated monitor.

4. For maximum sharpness, focus one-third of the way into a scene.

Break it: Used mostly with wide-angle landscape photography, this guideline allegedly finds the hyperfocal distance—the focus point that optimizes depth of field from nearest to farthest objects. But it is usually imprecise, and often plain wrong. Say your composition includes flowers 3 feet away and mountains 3 miles away. According to this rule, your optimal focus point is about 1 mile away!

To find the real hyperfocal distance, you could consult a distance chart or app (e.g.,dofmaster.com). Or simply double the distance of the nearest element in your composition and focus there—if those flowers are 3 feet away, pick something 6 feet away. Next, stop down the aperture until everything is acceptably sharp from front to back, and touch up focus as necessary. Live view makes it easier.

 

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