Five Common Photo Mistakes

Learning from the pros is always a great way to improve your skills. That's why we read books and watch videos, like the ones I highlighted in "Treasure Trove of Photo Tutorials." It's always instructive to see how the masters work and try to emulate them. But there's a lot to learn we can learn from the exact opposite--by studying the things that can go wrong.

This week, let's look at the five most common mistakes I see in everyday photography, and learn how to avoid them. And while you're at it, you might want to peek back at my recent "Getting Started in Digital Photography" for some more basic tips.

1. The Subject Is Underexposed

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Learning from the pros is always a great way to improve your skills. That's why we read books and watch videos, like the ones I highlighted in "Treasure Trove of Photo Tutorials." It's always instructive to see how the masters work and try to emulate them. But there's a lot to learn we can learn from the exact opposite--by studying the things that can go wrong.

This week, let's look at the five most common mistakes I see in everyday photography, and learn how to avoid them. And while you're at it, you might want to peek back at my recent "Getting Started in Digital Photography" for some more basic tips.

1. The Subject Is Underexposed

Underexposure--in which the subject is too dark and lacks detail--is the most common kind of exposure problem, usually because of a phenomenon called backlighting.

Consider how you generally frame a picture of someone: Often, you'll take a portrait with someone near a window or outdoors, with the bright sky in the background. Your camera measures the light in the scene and takes the picture, trying to get a good shot of all that light in the background. Unfortunately, that means the subject, who is not nearly as well lit as the background, gets underexposed.

There are a few ways to combat underexposure. You can avoid taking portraits in front of bright backgrounds, for instance. Another approach is to use your camera's exposure adjustment to overexpose the scene a little and add more light to your subject. If you want to really get fancy, try using your camera's spot meter mode to set the exposure based on the subject's face. For more tips on dealing with backlighting, see "Make the Best of Difficult Lighting."

2. The Photo Is Blurry

Blurry picture are the bane of every photographer. But diagnosing the problem isn't always easy, because there are many reasons for indistinct photos. For example, it's possible the image wasn't in focus, or that the shutter speed was too slow.

The solution to out-of-focus photos is to make sure the autofocus mechanism is locking in on the subject, not some other part of the scene. You could also switch to manual focus and set the focus by hand to the part of the picture that you want to emphasize.

The photo might also be blurry because the shutter speed is too slow to freeze the action. You can fix this by using Shutter Priority mode to control the shutter speed and increase the ISO, if necessary, to give the camera a faster shutter speed to work with.

3. The Subject Has Red Eyes

Ah, the old Zombie Eyes. Red eye almost always happens when you shoot in low-light conditions with a camera-mounted flash. The solution is to turn up the lights and turn off the flash. Shoot outdoors in daylight whenever possible. When you have to shoot indoors, make sure the camera's red-eye reduction mode is enabled. See "Avoid the Red Eye Effect" for all sorts of tips on avoiding this problem.

4. The Photo Is Too Cluttered

Novice photographers don't pay a lot of attention to the background. The more photos you take, however, the more developed your photographic eye will become. As you shoot more pictures you'll get a sense of how the foreground and background get compressed in photos: Busy scenes tend to look bad

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