Three Habits Quietly Stalling Your Photography
By: Alex Cooke (Fstoppers)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
More tutorials, a newer camera, and more hours in Lightroom will not make you a better photographer, no matter how much you spend chasing them. The traps that eat up beginners' time are easy to spot once you know them, and almost impossible to see when you don't.
Cody Mitchell lays out the specific mistakes that stalled his own progress for years, then explains what he'd do differently if he started over. The first trap is gear. Mitchell points out that when you admire someone's work, you can see the camera they used and buy the same one in two days, but you can't see the skill that actually made the image. He's putting his money where his mouth is by shooting more of his channel's photos on a Canon 5D classic, a 21-year-old, 12-megapixel body he picked up for $150 on eBay. A good photographer, he argues, can make a strong image on a prime, a zoom, a Sony a6600, or a Leica, because the work lives in the skill set.
The second trap starts the moment you see something pretty. Mitchell calls it the moth to the flame: you point the camera straight at the beautiful thing and expect a beautiful photo. A photograph of a gorgeous sunset just proves the sunset was gorgeous. Nothing in the frame shows your eye, your composition, or a decision you made. The fix is to pause and interrogate the scene. What about this actually interests you? Are you standing in the right spot? Should you be lower, higher, closer, zoomed out? Those choices are the whole craft, and skipping them leads straight into the next trap: coming home with 500 mediocre frames and telling yourself there has to be a keeper buried somewhere in the pile.
The copying question comes up as a bonus, and Mitchell's answer runs against what a lot of beginners assume. Emulating work you admire isn't plagiarism, it's the oldest form of practice there is. Painters copied masters for centuries before they found their own voice, and musicians learn by playing other people's songs note for note. Pull together a handful of images that speak to you, find the common thread, the light coming in from the side at golden hour, a 50mm look, a certain kind of subject, and go try to recreate it. You'll fall short every time, and that gap between what you attempted and what you got back is the lesson. This is the same principle behind deliberate practice in any skill: you improve fastest by reaching for a clear target and studying where you missed, not by wandering with no reference point at all.
If you dodge every trap, the path forward is composition, consistency, and volume. Mitchell frames it as getting photographically fit, and the analogy holds. Nobody pays a trainer and wakes up looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger. You do the reps. Photograph the same object 30 different ways and some of those frames will be worse than your first attempt, but a few will surprise you, and you'd never have found them by getting it right on the first try. Nail the image in camera and Lightroom becomes seasoning on top of good ingredients instead of a desperate attempt to rescue bad ones. You cannot polish a turd, as he puts it, and no preset or film look changes that.
Watch the full breakdown in the video above to hear how Mitchell coaches students past all four traps and why he thinks the failing is the fun part.
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My trusty old Nikon D100 finally went to pixel heaven so I'm becoming acquainted with a new camera. For me, reviewing information for beginning photographers seems appropriate.
The lessons in this article are pretty basic. But it's good to review the basics, occasionally.
I'm just bored shooting the same landscapes.
Here's a landscape of the local POTW. My new (used) camera has a lot more settings and I'm still playing with them.
I think the biggest impediment to my success in photography is that I don't take pictures. Not sure.