Photography beginners often make mistakes when shooting

Digital photography skills: 18 common mistakes in beginner photography

1. The corners of photos taken with a wide-angle lens are black

Mainly due to the difference between the flash coverage and the wide-angle lens Field of view mismatch. Most of the flash coverage of old-fashioned flash designs can only be matched with a 35mm small wide-angle lens. The field of view of a 28mm wide-angle lens is 12 degrees larger than that of a 35mm lens, so the surrounding areas of the picture are not exposed to light and become black. There are two ways to prevent it. One is to add a diffuser cover to the light to turn the flash into scattered light to expand the coverage; the other is to cover the lamp head with white gauze to allow the light to scatter so that the entire picture can receive even light.

2. The tone of the picture is blurry

After ruling out camera failure and hand shake, etc., it is necessary to check whether the lens is covered with dust or stained by stains. If this happens, avoid blowing with your mouth or wiping with a towel. Use a blower to blow off the dust on the lens, then use a lens brush to remove debris, and finally wipe it with lens paper to make the lens as bright as new. If there are still sweat stains, fingerprints and oil stains, take it to a camera repair shop to carefully remove it with lens cleaning fluid.

3. The subject is blurry and the background is clearly discernible

There are two possibilities. One is that when the manual focus camera is focusing, the focus is not on the subject or the subject is focused and the composition is changed. Second, when using an autofocus camera, you did not press the shutter button, lock the focus, and then recompose the picture, causing the focus to drift elsewhere in the composition.

4. The first few rows of group photos are clear, and the last few rows are blurry

For multi-row group photos, to ensure that everyone’s image is clear, three things must be done: First, Selective focus. If you take a group photo with five rows of people, choose the second row to focus; if you take a group photo with seven rows of people, choose the third row of people to focus. Second, do not set the aperture too large, generally f4-8 is appropriate to ensure sufficient depth of field. Third, the shutter speed should not be lower than 1/60 second to prevent someone’s head from turning and blurring the image.

5. The film is not exposed

There are two main reasons: First, you forget to take off the lens cover when shooting with a paraxial view camera. The scene in the viewfinder is clear, but the imaging light does not enter the lens. Film is not sensitive to light. Second, the 135 SLR camera that manually winds the film does not load the film in place, and does not pay attention to whether the film cassette shaft is rotating accordingly when rolling the film. Due to the slippage of the film leader, when the film take-up handle was moved, although the shutter was wound and the counter continued to count, the film did not move at all in the cassette. Although the counter showed that 36 shots had been taken, in fact, none of the film was exposed to light.

6. There are dark shadows in the four corners of the photo

There are two main reasons: First, the lens hood does not match the focal length of the lens. Using the 50mm standard lens hood on a 28mm focal length wide-angle lens will block the light entering the lens. Because the field of view of the header is 47 degrees, while the field of view of the 28mm wide-angle lens is 75 degrees. Second, when shooting with a 28mm wide-angle lens, a UV lens is already worn on the lens. If you wear a polarizer, because the polarizer is made of two pieces of glass, the frame is very thick, plus the frame of the UV lens. , will inevitably block the light entering the lens, making the corners of the photo black. If you need to use a polarizer when shooting with a wide-angle lens, you must first remove the UV lens and then install the polarizer to ensure that the picture receives even light.

7. The tone is dead white or dark, and lacks shadow gradation.

Regardless of whether the photo is black and white or color, only by accurate exposure can you obtain bright tone and rich gradation. A dead white photo means overexposure; a dark photo means underexposure. The in-camera metering system is designed based on the mid-gray reflectivity of 18%. It can accurately expose most scenes and restore colors. However, when encountering certain special lights or scenes, corrections need to be made based on metering. For example, if you do not increase the exposure by 1.5-2 levels when photographing snow scenes, white snow will become off-white; if you do not reduce the exposure by 1.5-2 levels when photographing coal, black coal will turn into dark gray. Because no matter how advanced a camera is, it has no thinking function and will only treat all scenes uniformly as a medium gray tone with a reflectivity of 18%.

8. Photos taken with electronic flash are still underexposed

There are two reasons: First, the aperture setting is too small. The flash speed of the flash is generally above 1/1000 second. The shutter has lost its light control function, and the exposure is mainly controlled by the aperture size. If there is no automatic transmission, when taking photos with flash, you must first calculate the aperture coefficient. Second, the flash has insufficient power. A newly purchased flash lamp needs to be charged and discharged more than ten times to activate the capacitor in the lamp before it can be used officially. The old flashlight charging signal light is only 70% charged when ignited. It can be fully charged for normal use only after 10 seconds of ignition.

9. In the photos taken by the SLR camera with flash, half of the picture is black.

This is because the curtain shutter of the SLR camera is out of sync with the flash. When taking pictures with a SLR camera using flash, pay attention to the camera's flash synchronization (each camera has different speeds).

10. The background of the portrait photo is clear and gorgeous, but the person’s face is dark

First, average metering was used when shooting backlight, and there was no fill-in light for the person’s face; second, the background is bright (snow scene) , desert, beach), the data recommended by the internal light meter was used for exposure. The background was moderately exposed and the characters were underexposed. There are three ways to solve this problem: one is to use a flash to fill in the light for the person; the other is to increase the exposure by 1-2 steps based on the metering; the third is to get close to the person and meter the face, and "lock" the exposure. After measuring (using the metering memory button or changing to manual exposure), return to the original position to compose the picture, focus, and shoot.

11. Group photo, the surrounding people are incomplete

There are two situations. One is to ignore the parallax when shooting with a head-up view camera, and the picture is too full; the other is to use a SLR Although the camera has no parallax, there is no room around the image. During the enlargement process, some of the image is suppressed by the surrounding areas. The color enlargement machine only enlarges about 95% of the negative image. So no matter what camera you use, you have to leave some leeway when composing your shot. Don't let the characters stand tall and fill the screen.

12. The entire photo has a bluish tone

First, it is caused by the high color temperature. On cloudy days or when thin clouds cover the sun, the color temperature of natural light is as high as 7000-12000K without using a color temperature correction filter; secondly, there are dense tree shades or huge blue advertisements, curtain walls and other surrounding light reflected light. The solution is to use a Leighton 85B color temperature reduction filter when shooting. If there is blue ambient light reflection nearby, move to an open place to shoot as much as possible.

13. The entire photo has an orange-red hue.

The following three situations may cause the photo to have a reddish hue. (1) Daylight color film is used under light without using the Leyden 80B color temperature conversion filter; (2) The color temperature of morning and evening sunlight is only 3200K, and the low color temperature causes an orange-red hue; (3) There are huge red advertisements or Red buildings reflect red light.

14. When shooting portraits with flash, there will be a strong shadow behind them.

When shooting with camera flash, if the person is very close to the background, there will be a black projection on the background. There are three solutions: first, keep the character away from the background so that the projection falls on the ground; second, remove the flash and connect it with a soft cord for side flash shooting; third, use a light-colored ceiling or wall for reflected flash shooting.

15. When using flash, the eyeballs of portraits will be blood-red

The red-eye phenomenon is easy to occur when camera flash is performed in low light. The reason is that under dark light, the pupil of the human eye dilates, and the strong light of the flash is suddenly irradiated. The pupil has no time to shrink, and the strong light directly hits the retina, and the blood-red color of the optic nerve will appear in the photo, forming "red eye". There are four ways to overcome this problem: first, remove the flash and connect it with a soft cord to flash sideways; second, ask the subject not to look directly at the camera lens; third, let the subject look at strong light sources such as lamps and windows for three minutes before shooting. Or pre-flash once before shooting; fourth, use a flash with red-eye reduction function.

16. There are shutter streaks on the captured TV pictures

Our country’s TV system transmits 25 frames per second. If the shutter speed is higher than 1/30 second, shutter streaks will appear. When shooting TV images with an ordinary camera, the appropriate shutter speed is 1/15 second.

17. The snow scene is dark and the snow is not white.

This is caused by insufficient exposure. The ground in the snow is very reflective, so the light meter still sets the exposure combination at 18% reflectivity, which will restore the snow scene to a medium gray tone. If you use average metering or center-weighted metering to expose, it will be underexposed by 1-2 stops, and the white snow will become a light gray tone. The way to prevent it is to increase the exposure by 1-2 stops according to the metering reading (open the aperture 1-2 stops or reduce the shutter speed 1-2 stops) to compensate.