Shooting as a team can be a big challenge. It may seem easy – two people means you can get twice as many shots! But the logistics of working together (who shots what, from where, with what, and when) can make anyone flustered.

We have been shooting as a team since the very beginning – about 7 years now. And along the way we’ve had our fair share of frustrations. But after many, many sessions together we came up with a system that not only prevented any fights, but actually helped us create better photos! Here’s what we’ve learned.

Pick A Lead Shooter

The most important element of our team shooting system is to have only one lead shooter. We are both shooting, of course, but one of us really takes the reigns, and directs the shoot. The other hangs back, and plays a quieter role.

Now, I’m sure there are many two-person teams out there where both take the lead and it works for them! But we personally found that whenever we would try that we’d be stepping all over each other, interrupting each other, and would both get frustrated quickly. Once we switched to a lead/second system, things started to go much smoother.

You can take turns being the lead, or if it’s more suited to one person, they can assume that role on a more consistent basis. Whatever works best for your team!

The Role Of The Lead

The lead shooter is the one that the clients have the most interaction with. I think this makes things a little less overwhelming, especially for kids and shy folks. They only have one person directing them, so it doesn’t seem like they are being ambushed with instructions.

When you’re shooting as a team, a question you’ll be asked all the time is “Where should I look??”. Multiple cameras can make people uncomfortable. They can’t possibly look at both cameras at once, so they don’t know what to do.

We tell them right at the beginning of the shoot to look at the lead shooter’s camera, and ignore the other person. This often gets a chuckle, and then they’d visibly relax.

Getting Variety

Our style of shooting is primarily photojournalistic and candid, but we still always define “must-have” photos for every session. It is generally the role of the lead shooter to get these essential images. This way we aren’t both assuming the other person will get a certain shot, and end up missing it. For super important moments (like the first kiss during a wedding) we both shoot it, to ensure it’s properly captured.

When one of us is focused on getting the critical images, this gives the other a lot more freedom to experiment. The resulting collection of images has great balance – with both classic, timeless shots, as well as more innovative ones included.

We each use different lenses, and try to stand at different distances and angles. Not only does this mean we aren’t tripping over each other, but it also helps us to get a ton of variety!

How To Not Get In Each Other’s Way

This was one of the trickiest things to figure out. I’m sure you can appreciate that having someone getting in your way while you’re trying to get a shot is frustrating. Now imagine that person keeps doing it over and over again…

Sorry, Rob!

Yeah, this was something I was really bad at. I was often the lead shooter, so I’d be right in there with the subjects, chatting away, completely oblivious to Rob standing behind me, waiting to get his shot.

So here’s the really complex system we came up with. When one person has a shot ready, and the other is in their way, they wait for a pause in the conversation to say “I have a shot here.”

Can you believe that took us a couple years to figure out?!

Once we had that system of simple, clear communication, it was a breeze. After you’d say you had a shot, the other person would quickly finish up what they were doing, and get out of the way. No more frustration!

Now, in situations where you can’t talk to each other (like in the middle of a wedding ceremony) this is a bit trickier. The time that this happened most often was during the ceremony, when one person would be shooting from the aisle, and the other would head to the back of the room to get a wide shot of the venue. In that situation we simply knew we had to be very aware of where the other was, and check periodically to make sure you weren’t in the way.

Over-Preparation Is Impossible

When you shoot as a team, preparing for the shoot together is a huge advantage. It gives you the chance to ensure you’re both on the same page before the session begins, and that makes a real difference in the results you create together.

To begin with, we always do our location scouting together so we are both familiar with the spot. This also lets us discuss any potential challenges, and come up with solutions together. There’s a lot that goes into great location scouting, and two heads are really better than one.

Before the shoot, we time-sync our cameras to make sure it’s easy to sort the photos afterwards.

Then we talk through the game plan together. We discuss what role we are each going to be taking, and outline any essential information about the subjects or situation. This is especially important with wedding ceremonies, where there is very little communication allowed once things get started. For those, we go so far as to discuss who will be standing where and when. Think of it as a choreographed performance!

It may seem like a bit excessive to prepare this much, but the more polished our interactions are during a session, the more confidence our clients have in us. We don’t ever want seem confused about what is going on, or start bickering in front of them. Not only would that make us look really bad, but it would make them anxious, and not as easy to photograph!

The Most Important Elements: Support and Patience

No matter how much you prepare, things won’t always go exactly according to plan. But as a team, you can help each other out!

Whenever the lead is shooting, the second shooter is always keeping an eye out for interesting locations and light to shoot with next. This lets the lead shooter have a bit of a break if necessary. They can finish up, turn to the second and say “What next?” and the second has a plan ready to go. This takes a lot of pressure off, and keeps things moving along smoothly.

If there was ever a time when things really went sideways, and one of us messed up, the name of the game was to remain calm, be patient, and stay positive. Any serious discussions were always held after the shoot was completely over. Our goal is always to give our clients an amazing experience, and fantastic photos, and when those are at the top of your mind, it’s a whole lot easier to forgive mistakes and work together to do your best!

And finally, just like preparing together is helpful, reviewing together is beneficial. You can discuss how the shoot went, whether there was anything that worked really well, or anything that didn’t. You can brainstorm potential solutions together and figure out how to improve next time. Who knows, you may even come up with something better than “Hey, I have a shot here!”.

As much as shooting as a team comes with it’s own challenges, we wouldn’t have it any other way. We are stronger together, and love helping each other create better work.

What’s most important is that you and your teammate come up with a system that works for you. And once you have something going, don’t be afraid to adjust, experiment with new techniques, or start fresh. There’s always room to improve, and have more fun together!

What tips do you have for shooting as a team? Or do you prefer solo shooting? Let us know in the comments below!

Photographers come in all shapes and sizes. Not only do they each have their own view of the world, but they also love different aspects of the great big discipline of photography.

You’re a unique photographer. There are certain parts of photography that get you super excited. Different elements of the craft fill you with energy and make your shutter finger get twitchy, just dying to go take some photos!

So here are a few different kinds of photographers. Which one sounds most like you? Or are you one of those loveable hybrids, that draw from a few different types? Figure it out, then tell us who you are in the comments!

You love learning the ins and outs of the technique of photography. You can be found setting up a dozen lights, in search of that perfect ratio. You know the exact time of day when the sun sets and produces the most beautiful tones for your images. You are on a quest to master composition, and are intimately aware of all the functions and features of your gear.

Are you a Technician? Here are a couple articles you might like:

• What’s In Our Camera Bag
• How To Make Your Own Studio. For $20.

You adore studying photography and can often be found in the Photography section of your local bookstore or library. You have shelves of books ranging from technical manuals to inspiring art collections. You’re fascinated with the history of photography, and love learning about the different photographers who helped shape the craft.

Are you a Scholar? Then you gotta check out these articles!

• The Library
• 8 Things Vivian Maier Can Teach You About Photography

Photography is your work. You’re always thinking about what new products you can create for your clients, and the creative ways to market your services. You excel at communicating the value of what you do, and work hard to keep your business organized and productive.

Are you a Businessperson? Take a peek at these, you’ll probably dig ‘em:

• 26 Things I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Photography Business
• How To Help Your Clients Prepare For Great Photos

You love the social aspect that photography provides. You frequent photography forums, and love getting to know the other members and joining their discussions. You go to photo meet ups, and have tons of photo friends on different social media sites. You value the community and camaraderie of photography.

Are you a Social Butterfly? These may float your boat!

• Book Report: How To Win Friends and Influence People
• The Science of Facial Expressions And How It Can Improve Your Photography

You use photography as a way to document life. You’re the one at all the events with a camera in hand, recording the special moments around you. You have years and years of photos, and love to spend time looking through them and enjoying the memories they stir up.

Are you a Documentarian? Then I bet these will tickle your fancy:

• How To Photograph Your Friends (And Why It’s Super Important)
  
• 8 Quick and Easy Tips for Better Holiday Photos

You are passionate about doing good and helping others, and see photography as a way to achieve that. You like to use your photos to create change, to spread a message, and to make a difference.

Are you a Do-Gooder? Here are a couple posts that are right up your alley:

• Voluntography: How Shooting For Free Made Me A Better Photographer
• Photography Is Magic

You spend time thinking about the message of your work. You shoot to capture a feeling. You’re not afraid to experiment and think outside the box in order to create something new. You are deeply connected to your photos.

Are you an Artist? Check these articles out, they’re all sorts of artsy awesomeness:

• 5 Lessons Learned Looking For My *Why*
• What Are You So Afraid Of?

Now the big question! Which type are you? Does one speak strongly to you? Or are you a mix of a few? Is there a type that we missed? Share with us in the comments below!

I have a question for you. Do you think photography is actually important? Does it even matter?

Now, given that you’re on a website that’s all about photography, I’m going to assume you are a photographer. So you probably enjoy photography. And a question like that seems to have an easy answer. But maybe things aren’t quite so black and white…

Photography Doesn’t Matter

People are always saying that the camera is just a tool, and what matters are the photos you create with it.

But maybe we can take that a step further.

What if photography itself is just a tool? And what actually matters is the message you’re communicating.

It’s not the composition that really matters – it’s the moment that it captures. It’s not the depth of field, but the feeling that we should pay the most attention to.

What if photography is nothing more than a medium for the message. And in that sense, all photographic considerations should take a back seat to pure communication, in whatever form that takes.

Now, let’s look at it from the other side…

Photography Does Matter

The “rules” of photography, like good composition, proper exposure, a well chosen depth of field – those are all designed to help you effectively convey your message. They are there to allow you translate the moment you experience into a two-dimensional image. In that sense, photography itself is very important. Without a good understanding of the technical stuff, you’ll never be able to make your viewer feel what you want them to feel.

We could go even further here. The act of photographing can bring more importance to a moment. By bringing a camera up to your eye, you give that moment more value. When you capture it with a press of the shutter, you are saying “This is worth remembering”. Photography can define what matters.

Why Even Ask?

Maybe you’re wondering what the point of even thinking about all this is. Well, I find that a lot of photographers (ourselves included) tend to get caught up with the photography side of things. We worry about gear and technique; about the rules and when to break them; and about great light and creative composition. And those are all important things! But maybe we don’t spend enough time worrying about the message and the feeling.

Mom-Sharp

We’ve always been very concerned with the sharpness of our photos. We use all prime lenses because they produce crisp results. Soft images are quickly discarded when sorting.

And I think that it’s good to push yourself to create consistent, technically solid images!

But recently my opinion of the importance of sharpness has changed. And to reflect that I’ve coined a new term. It’s called “mom-sharp”. It came up when we were looking at some photos we took of our new son. I pointed out one I liked, and Rob lamented “Ugh, it’s not sharp though.” I replied “It’s sharp enough for me! It’s mom-sharp.”

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t perfectly in focus. I loved the photo because I loved the moment and the person it captured. The technical stuff didn’t matter nearly as much as the feeling.

What Do You Think?

There isn’t really any one answer to this question, and I suspect it will change from shoot to shoot and year to year, for every photographer. But what do YOU think? Should we spend more time meditating on the message? Or is the technical stuff so critical to communication that it needs to be a large part of our study? Does it all depend on the type of shoot? Does the answer change for a hobbyist compared to a professional?

Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

See, photographers put so much time and effort into creating wonderful images – but many don’t put enough time into keeping them safe. And we get it – backup isn’t the most thrilling topic, and the information that is out there can be pretty confusing.

But the problem is that hard drives aren’t as secure as many people think. In fact, they WILL FAIL at some point. They are just mechanical devices, and they wear out! And unless you have a good backup system, any photos you had on that drive will be lost.

Unfortunately, hard drive failure is just one way that you could lose your photos. There are other threats lurking in the shadows! Data corruption, theft, disaster (like a dragon burning your house down) and even simple human error (Uh oh, was I supposed to delete that?). The world is a scary place for photos!

So we’ve spent many, many hours thoroughly researching, testing, and putting together this resource – to help you easily create a backup system that is perfect for your needs!

And to ensure you enjoy the learning process, we’ve filled it with beautiful illustrations, and a fairy tale!! Yep, dragons and wizards. Backup can be fun!

We really appreciate you spending the time to take a peek, so we’re giving you a chance to WIN a free iPad mini! Woo!

So click here to head over to the Backup or Die page to check things out, enter the iPad giveaway and see how this eBook can help you keep your photos safe!

Hope you enjoy!

Rob & Lauren

Pros and hobbyists alike, we’ve all done it before. We’ve spent countless hours taking, organizing and editing our personal photos, only to leave the final jpegs on our hard drives, collecting digital dust.

And no wonder: with the digital age, you not only have countless shots to choose from and the opportunity to edit them endlessly – you also have to make all of the design decisions that go into creating a custom album. With all that choice, it’s no wonder that the easiest thing to do is to do nothing at all.

Album design applications that offer premade templates and a limited selection of design features may make the decision-making process more manageable (and the likelihood of you finally printing your vacation photos a whole lot higher). But they are by nature limited; finding a company that offers an aesthetic that suits your tastes and a print quality that meets your standards can be tough.

Your Very Own Custom Moleskine

We’ve long been fans of Moleskine, the century-old Italian design company renowned for its timeless black notebooks favoured by the likes of Hemingway and Picasso. When we saw that they had teamed up with MILK to offer photo books, we were very excited. Our very own custom Moleskine at long last! So we decided to check it out, to see whether the Moleskine+MILK pairing could deliver a smooth album-building experience that produced a finished product boasting professional-quality printing and classic design.

Today, I’m taking you through my experience creating a Moleskine+MILK Photo Book plus, design through to delivery.

The Product

The Photo Book plus is the mid-range option among the three album styles offered by Moleskine+MILK (for more on the other two check out the company’s website). It’s marketed as a step up from the basic album, with extra design features, digital functionality, and a set of predesigned spreads – or “editorial themes” – that differ depending on the kind of book you’re after. In essence, the themes are meant to narrow down the choices you need to make when creating an album, while still giving you enough flexibility to choose the elements you want to include – from photo and text spreads, fonts and colour schemes.

Sitting on a stack of travel and food photos I’d taken from a trip to Italy in 2012, I opted for the “multipurpose” theme, to gain access to a wide range of spreads, including text-intensive cookbook-style layouts and more standard photo-friendly spreads.

Construction

All in all, the album construction looks solid (not to mention sleek – just like a classic, hard-sided Moleskine notebook). The cover is sturdy with smooth edges and the pages are well-aligned. It looks and feels like a quality Moleskine product, which means it should stand up to the test of time.

Moleskine+MILK have added a couple of cool features to make the final product feel less like a notebook and more like an album: a nifty hard-sided linen case and printed labels, attached to both the book and the case, showing the title you’ve chosen for your album. Nice touches!

Paper

Holding with the Moleskine aesthetic, the album comes standard with matte, ivory paper. The ivory isn’t so far from white as to be distracting, and the finish is smooth and elegant, not the plasticky finish you sometimes find in photo books. The weight feels great in your fingers. Thin enough that it’s easy to flip through pages, but not so thin that you feel like you’re going to rip your work.

That being said, the paper isn’t thick enough to prevent the silhouettes of photos on other pages from peaking through. Fortunately, this only occurs on whitespace – you never see a photo coming through another photo. Not a huge deal, in my opinion – we found the same issue with similarly-priced albums we’ve made with other companies. But something to be aware of if you’re super-picky about paper weight, since there are no other paper options here.

Print Quality

I’m impressed with the print quality. Moleskine+MILK use press printing and even at close range, photos look super sharp. I sharpened before exporting and exported at full size, and would take the same steps next time around.

On the whole, colours, saturation and contrast all look great. Everything’s just a touch warmer than it appears on my computer, but I suspect this is because the images are printed on ivory paper (and I wouldn’t hesitate to print on ivory again). As always, colour calibration of your own monitor is key to making sure your prints turn out as you’d like them to!

Darker tones came out a bit darker than I’d expected, sometimes to the point where a bit of detail was lost in areas with lots of blacks or deep shadows (everywhere else, detail was awesome). I wasn’t disappointed with the end result, but I’d be tempted to try to correct for it next time if I was working with shots with dark blacks.

Overall, the photos printed beautifully – edges are sharp, textures look impressively true to life, and the finish is an easy-on-the-eyes matte rather than super-shiny. The text, too, looks great. It’s elegant, well-saturated and crisp.

Price

Here are the specs on what you get when you order a Photo Book plus:

• 7×10 portrait or 9.25×7.4 landscape album
• 60 pages
• Black hard-cover book with inset album title printed on ivory cardstock
• Black hard-sided linen case with album title printed on ivory cardstock
• Moleskine styling inside and out (elastic closure, ribbon bookmark, extendable inner pocket, stitched binding, standard “If found” front page, Moleskine logo embossed onto the back page of the book cover and back of the slipcase and printed inside the front cover of the book)
• Downloadable PDF of your album designed for tablet (but works on anything with a PDF reader)
• Digital “Flip Book” copy of your album that can be shared on Facebook, Twitter or via email
• Ability to embed video into your Flip Book

Total Cost: US$100 + shipping and subject to import duties and taxes (shipping to Canada from New Zealand, where Moleskine+MILK is based, came in at US$18.99). Preordering a book (paying before you start building it) will save you $30 off the list price – a good deal!

Design Options

What makes the Photo Book plus unique from the other Moleskine+MILK products is the “editorial theme” function, which gives you access to a library of customized layouts that have been designed to work well with the type of book you’re making, whether it be a wedding album, a travelogue, a cookbook, or one of eight other themes. Essentially, they’ve done all the layout work for you. And I have to say, being able to drop a snazzy recipe template into a book of travel photos is pretty cool.

From there, your design options get pretty limited. Like I said before, the paper type is set (ivory, matte). You choose one of five fonts and one of eight colour schemes, which are then used throughout your book, with the extent of your choice being whether to set the font size in a text box to small, medium or large. As for the spreads themselves, you choose which layout to use, but there’s no option to resize or move the photo and text boxes.

For someone with album design skills, all of this might sound pretty restrictive. And at times, I felt a little frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t tweak things here and there. But in a sense, the restrictions are really one of the key selling features of the book. They’ve done all the detail work – figuring out how big margins should be and what font sizes will work well with the proportions of the book – making it all that much easier for someone with no knowledge of programs like InDesign to make really beautifully designed books.

And even if you do know how to use InDesign, these books can shave a lot of time off of your process by taking care of all the layout details for you.

Having the flexibility to include as few or as many photos as you want, within a reasonable range, would be nice. Right now, the page number is set to 60, no more and no less. That being said, Moleskine+MILK does offer expandable, hard-sided books starting at US$50 for 20 pages ($35 if you preorder) plus $1 per extra page. So the option is there, it just doesn’t come with the same extent of snazzy layout options.

The Process

As a brand new company, Moleskine+MILK still has a bit of a ways to go before their book-making process matches up with the ones offered by veterans like Blurb, but I’m impressed with what they’ve done so far. Their online book-building tool is pretty slick, and gives you a great sense of what your album is going to look like in print. And the process is straight forward: select your theme, upload your photos, choose your layouts and you’re off.

As the company grows, it would be great to see basic functions like spellcheck and undo/redo built into the application. Until then, expect to spend some time proofreading or copying and pasting text in from a word processing program.

When I was writing the draft of this review last week, I had made a note about how great it would be to see a function added that would allow you to easily drag and drop photos from the library to the template. When I was making my album, I had to reload images and templates every time I wanted to make a change. Well good news, guys: they announced just yesterday that drag and drop has been added! I gave it a whirl last night and found that it worked nicely. This is a HUGE plus. Albums should come together in lightning speed!

There are still a few bugs that need sorting out (like photos that inexplicably fail to upload), but you can tell from the existing functions – like near-constant autosaves, the feature that rejects photos that are too small to ensure a quality print, and the recent addition of drag and drop – that the company is committed to making a user-friendly, quality product. With that in mind, I fully expect the bugs to be ironed out, and fast.

They’ve made a good effort to incorporate web functions into the design process (no option to do offline design as of yet). You can upload photos from Flickr, Picasa and Facebook (web-sized photos will be too small to pop into full-sized spreads, but they do work in the smaller templates), and share a preview of your work in progress and the final album with friends via Facebook, Twitter and email. They’ve also built in a collaborate function, where you can invite your family and friends to contribute to the album you’re creating. The possibilities there are pretty cool!

Moleskine+MILK states in the fine print that they’re not a data hosting site, so once you’ve printed your book, your library is wiped and your opportunity to edit your album is gone (you can reprint the same album though). For the benefit of the company and their customers, I hope that they add a short-term data storing feature down the road; personally, I’d happily buy more copies of the album I made if I could swap a few photos and bits of text here and there. But since I’m pretty sure my mom doesn’t want a book that’s been dedicated “For David”, I’m stuck with the one copy.

The books are printed in China and, having submitted over Chinese New Year, the product took a while to get to me – about a month from when I hit “Submit” to when it arrived in the mail. The company does warn that products submitted over holidays will take longer to arrive, so if you order a book outside of holiday season you can reasonably expect a shorter turnaround time (7-14 days, according to the website).

Conclusion

Having only been in the album printing business since the fall of 2012, Moleskine+MILK is on to a good thing. There is still some work to be done before the book-building process is 100% user-friendly and bug-free (yesterday’s addition of drag and drop is a giant step in the right direction!), and they don’t yet offer the same range of design features that you’ll find with a company like Blurb (no ability to use InDesign to make your own layouts). But from our email exchanges with them and the activity on their Facebook page, it’s easy to see that they’re committed to adding helpful features, working through wrinkles with speed and generally offering a great product.

And they already do. Despite the few hiccups I encountered as I built the Photo Book plus, I can’t wait to start building another one, because the final product is stellar. Like I said at the beginning of this review, I’ve long been a big fan of the Moleskine design, and the application here is beautifully executed. The styling and construction are great, and the photos look goooood. And despite my desire to fiddle around with layout sizes, I love that the templates make it easy for anyone to build a beautiful book!

The end product will inspire you and the people you share it with to get their photos off their hard drives and into albums. With one quick flip through the book I made, Lauren and Rob were already excited about making one of their own. Success!

Special Offer

Right now, until the end of the month, they have a pretty sweet offer going if you’d like to try out their new autofill tool. Here are the details:

Upload your images and use our new Autofill Tool to make a Photo Book faster than you can boil an egg. Try it out with this tempting offer. Make a 20-page Medium Square Moleskine Photo Book for just US$20, usually US$50! Simply enter code BOILANEGG/MOLESKINE when you check out.

Try it now!

Offer valid until 31 March 2013, not valid in conjunction with any other offer.

We’ve been writing on this site for nearly 3 years now. As I looked back over all the advice we’ve given, I asked myself an important question: “Why should anyone pay attention to anything we have to say?”

The more I pondered this, the more worried I became. You see, it turns out there are a lot of reasons why you should NOT listen to us. So I figured we should come clean and tell you guys the truth…

1. We Are Biased

Yep, I’ll admit it. We come complete with a set of biases. We have leanings, opinions, and deep-seated beliefs that colour how we look at things. They even influence what types of articles we write here. As much as we can attempt to look at issues from different perspectives, we will always have some bias.

2. We Are Newbies

We’ve been photographers since 2005, started shooting “jobs” in 2006, and went full time in 2007. Long story short, we could easily be considered newbies, especially given that we look at photography as a life-long pursuit.

3. We Have No Formal Education

It’s true — we never went to school for photography. Or even took a night class. We could have learned everything backwards and upside-down for all we know.

4. Our Experience Is Very Limited

We started off shooting weddings, and then migrated to portrait photography. And that’s all that we’ve done on a serious professional level. There are many, many areas of photography that we have very little to no experience in.

5. We’ve Only Worked In One City

Along that point, we’ve only worked in one city. We don’t know what it’s like to pick up everything and start over again where you don’t know a single person. We don’t know how different things are in a small town, or a massive city. We only know our medium-sized Canadian hometown.

6. We Don’t Keep Up With The Photography World Very Much

Compared to many photographers we are practically hermits. We hear little tidbits of photography industry news every now and then, but in general we’re not very up on the latest hot products or the biggest celebrity photographers du jour. (Note: this also applies to pop music, which we seem to be a couple years behind on.)

7. The Industry Is Changing Rapidly

It seems like things are completely different than when we started our careers. And in a few years, they will be even more different. This industry is changing crazy fast, and what we experienced back at our beginning is not the same as what a new photographer will experience now.

 So, Is There Any Reason To Listen To Us?

Well, maybe. Let’s give it a shot…

1. We Love Photography

We think about this crazy art form all day, every day. There is practically nothing we do that we don’t ponder how it might relate to photography. Obsessive.

2. We Love Teaching

From the very beginning of our careers we’ve had a strong desire to share what we’ve learned with others. It’s just our way. Every time we come across a new insight, we try to figure out the best way to explain it so someone else can benefit. Teaching is as important to us as photography itself.

3. We Love Photographers

And we mean photographers in the way we like to define it — anyone who loves photography, regardless of how long they’ve been doing it. Whether they are full-time pros, or never make a cent, it doesn’t matter. Heck, even if you’ve never picked up a camera in your life, but are thinking about it, we love you, because you want to capture something that you find interesting. It’s pure creation, and that’s awesome.

4. There Is No Truth

Forgive me for getting a bit philosophical here, but this is the big idea of all this rambling (finally, right?).

There is no single “truth”.

In the end, nothing anyone says is right or wrong. What matters is how you feel about an idea, and whether it rings true in your heart, for your work, and your business. That’s the bottom line.

So for everything you hear us—or anyone—say, do just one simple thing: take a second to think about it. If you like it, great. Keep it. If it doesn’t feel right, leave it, and keep on looking.

Being true to yourself is far more important than listening to what two silly ninja-obsessed photographers say anyway…

Bad habits might not completely ruin your photos, but they can hold you back from creating the best images possible. The worst part about them? We tend not to realize we even have the bad habit until it’s pointed out!

Here are 6 bad habits that can prevent you from being your most awesome photographer self.

1. Standing Still

Keeping your feet still when you’re shooting is a surefire way to limit your creative potential. But it’s an easy habit to fall into, especially if you use a zoom lens. Instead of shooting a scene from just one perspective, get into the habit of walking around, moving closer and stepping back. Don’t rely on the zoom! Use your feet, and see how quickly you start getting way more interesting perspectives.

Note: If you’re shooting a 2 min long exposure you can completely ignore this advice. In that instance, standing still is a very good thing. ;)

2. Chimping

Chimping is the act of taking a photo, and then looking at the result on the back of your screen while going “Ooooo!”. There’s nothing inherently wrong with checking out your photos on your camera — it can be a great way to learn, and fix any glaring mistakes. The problem exists when you do this, and in the process, stop paying attention to what’s going on in front of you and miss capturing a great moment.

So use the back of the screen only when completely necessary (checking your exposure in tricky lighting, for example) and then keep your eyes on the scene, ready to get the shot.

3. Bringing The Camera Down To Change Settings

This goes along with chimping, but is a different bad habit. And even though I’ve been shooting professionally for 6 years now, I still do this all the time. I don’t know why! But basically, when I need to change my ISO, I bring the camera down, look at the screen, and change it. And by doing this, I take my eyes off the scene, and miss important moments.

It’s taking a considerable mental effort to force myself to adjust my settings while keeping the camera up to my eye. It requires memorizing where all the buttons are, but when you do manage it, it will really help you to stay focused, and keep careful watch on your subject. Don’t wait until you’re actually in the middle of a shoot to practice this. Take some time on your own to make sure you can change all the important settings without bringing the camera down. You can even do this while you’re just sitting on the couch reading articles about bad photography habits. ;)

4. Talking From Behind Your Camera

Have you ever been directing your subjects, and received a puzzled look and a “Huh?”, then realized that you had the camera covering your face for every word? If you have this bad habit, it’s definitely an important one to break! Not only does clear communication help your subjects to relax, and feel more confident in your abilities as their photographer, but showing your pretty face (complete with a genuine smile) will truly help put people at ease. This is critical whether you’re shooting a paid client or a stranger in another country.

5. Neglecting To Square Up

Careful composition is a hallmark of great photography, so sloppy habits here will definitely hold you back. First, if you have a horizon in your image, make it level. The human eye expects horizons to be level, so one that is slightly tilted will be distracting. If you have trouble with this bad habit, you can install a grid in your viewfinder to help you out.

Note: Sometimes it can aid your image to have a tilted horizon (perhaps to create a sense of movement), but it should be a conscious decision, not a careless mistake!

Then, when you’re shooting against a wall or a building — something that has straight lines — be sure that you are standing perfectly square to it. If you’re at a very slight angle, the lines won’t be straight, and it will again feel distracting. This rule can be broken as well, as long as you make the decision to do it!

6. Thinking You’ll “Fix It Later”

This habit can apply to anything from shooting with an incorrect exposure, failing to move a stray hair, or leaving a small piece of garbage in the frame. It’s easy to get caught up in wanting to get the shot, and thinking you can just fix these little things afterwards on your computer. And you can. But it’s at the cost of improving your skills and being an efficient shooter.

It’s simple. Get as much right in camera as you possibly can. Don’t let digital processing be a crutch that prevents you from strengthening your technical skills!

And seriously, you’ll be cursing yourself when you have to edit that stray hair out of dozens of photos, spending hours on the computer, when you could have spent 10 seconds to move it during the shoot. That’s a mistake that you’ll hopefully only make once!

Bad habits are easy to pick up, and difficult to break. But if you keep working on adopting good habits, and getting rid of the bad ones, you’re sure to see your technique, and your photos, just keep getting better and better!

Your Turn!

What are some other bad photography habits that you should break? Tell us in the comments below!

We’re super excited to launch a brand new feature to the site today! This is one we’re pretty stoked about. Drumroll please…..

It’s the Photography Concentrate Explorers Club!! Wooooo!

Haven’t you always wanted to belong to an Explorers Club? I know I have. Now we can all be part of one together!!

Basically, you sign up for the club, and get access to The Freebie Library, which is where we stash all the snazzy free photography resources we create. You’ll also receive exclusive content right into your inbox!

And the best part? The Club is totally free!! Yippee!

So sign up at the top right of the blog, at the bottom of this post, or mosey over to The Explorers Club page where you can learn more (and then join!).

A Brand New Freebie!

And to celebrate the launch of the club, we’re releasing a brand new, super amazing freebie!

These original posters are crazy gorgeous, and are the perfect way to show off your camera love, and decorate your office/room/anywhere!

Whether your love your Canon, Nikon, Holga, Leica or Polaroid, we have a poster for you. And feel free to choose between the classy black and white, or full colour version.

To get the posters, sign up for The Explorers Club, and you’ll get full access to The Freebie Library and can download to your heart’s content!

We’re super excited for this new adventure, and hope you’ll come along with us!

Tons of love,

Dear New Photographer,

How’s your day going? I hope it’s going well. Take any cool photos lately? Good to hear it!

Anyway, the reason I’m writing you is because I want to say I’m sorry. Sorry for how you’re so often treated by “the industry”. Other photographers. The “pros”.

I know you love photography, and are excited to start making your photo dreams come true. You may have worked up the courage to email your favourite shooters asking for advice. Or maybe you posted your questions online. And you might have been met with a cold shoulder. Possibly even dismissed and mocked. Or criticized. Called a “newbie”. Blamed for “ruining the industry” and making it hard for others to make a living.

And that sucks. It really does. No one deserves to have their dreams dashed. No one.

I hope you know that it’s not personal. I mean, they don’t even know you. They don’t know how long you’ve planned this, how much you care about this, how hard you plan to work, or how happy it makes you. They don’t remember how scary it was to jump in. To make that decision to go for it. If they did, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick with the mockery. Maybe they’d actually see themselves in you.

But it’s all too easy to forget that stuff.

For one thing, these photographers are busy. Really, really busy. To run a successful business takes a LOT of work, and they’ve sacrificed countless evenings with friends, weekends off, and general relaxing-fun-time in order to make their dreams happen. Going for years without summer weekends is enough to make anyone a bit cranky. Trust me.

And if they’ve been in business for a while, they’ve probably started getting emails on a weekly (or daily!) basis from new photographers, asking for answers to questions, or to shadow them while they shoot.

Maybe at first they were flattered. Someone thought they were good enough to want their opinion! But trust me, that wears off quickly when you find yourself spending hours answering the same questions over and over while your client work keeps piling up.

So don’t feel bad if they can’t answer your questions, or let you tag along. Like I said, it has nothing to do with you. They’re just crazy busy, and their clients have to come first. (That’s a key to a successful business, by the way. Write that one down.)

Oh, and if they do answer some questions for you, please make sure you thank them profusely. Send them a gift card for a cup of coffee or something. Show them how much you value their time. Because soon, when you’re neck deep in client work, you’ll realize just how important time is.

Now, regarding the name calling, and the finger pointing for “ruining the industry”. Y’know, I think on some level the pros are quite jealous of you. No seriously. Let me explain.

Photography has changed dramatically in recent years. Photographers used to have to invest thousands and thousands of dollars to get the basic equipment. I mean, memory cards alone used to be a couple hundred dollars a pop! Now you can stroll into BestBuy and for under $1K you can walk out with a decent setup. Add in a free WordPress theme, and you’re ready to roll. It’s a LOT easier (and cheaper) to start up a photography business these days, and they are a bit miffed by that. They struggled a lot more to get running, and now you have all these luxuries they wish they had when they got going.

Of course that’s no excuse for being rude. But realize that you have a lot of advantages these days that didn’t used to exist.

Which brings me to something important that I think the pros wish you knew. And that’s that a nice camera, a spiffy logo and a website do not make a business.

See, they know this deep in their bones. They’ve been through the trenches. They’ve come to realize that it takes a megaton of hard work, a lot of business savvy, and countless hours spent doing boring tasks like bookkeeping to make a photography business run. They see you all caught up in the honeymoon phase of freshly printed business cards, and they wish you knew that it takes so much more to make it really happen in the long run. It takes so much to support your family with photography.

I guess that’s why they get cranky. They’re trying to feed their kids with their art. That’s crazy hard to do. And that brings me to the biggest point of contention. Pricing. I swear I’ve literally seen steam come out of their ears when they see new shooters charging next to nothing. They foam at the mouth. They grab the pitchforks. Things get ugly.

Now, I’d wager that many of them started off charging way too little. It’s an easy mistake to make. But over the years they’ve come to realize that you can’t succeed by undercharging. It leads straight to failure in the long run. They figured that out the hard way — by spending way too many late nights trying to get caught up, and realizing they didn’t charge near enough for how much work it really takes. So they figured out how to charge appropriately, and upped their prices, and worked hard to show clients the real value in what they do.

Then they see you charging so little, and they get mad. They know it’s a bad path to go down. And they wish they could make you understand how critically important it is to price your work well. For the industry. And for yourself. 

Look, I want you to know that you do have a real shot at this. So often the pros make it seem impossible, but it’s not. Of course it’s not. But it is hard. You need to WORK. You need to LEARN. About pricing. And marketing. And taxes. And insurance. And contracts. And social media. And client relations. And just straight up photography! In fact, you need to accept that you can never stop working and you can never stop learning if you want to make it. Things are changing fast, my friend. Every week there’s a new camera, a new product, a new app that makes the whole industry shift. And if you pause for a moment, you might get left behind.

The pros feel that pressure. They are at their desks every day working to keep up. To stay on top of things. It’s draining.

And when they see you, all fresh and full of energy, with your shiny new camera that they can’t afford because it’s not in their yearly gear budget, and your website that looks a million times better than their first website did, they lash out at you. It’s not fair. But they’re tired. And scared. And working like mad to keep their dreams alive while putting food on the table and a roof over their heads.

So don’t let it get you down when you see pros bad-mouthing beginners. Just get to work. And understand how much heart and courage and sheer will it takes to make things happen. Soon enough they’ll see it. They’ll see that you’re just as passionate as they are, and they’ll welcome you with open arms.

Because in the end, we all just love photography and want to spend our days shooting. And it makes us so happy to see others get to live that dream alongside us.

Lots of love,

Lauren :)

We pretty much only use centre-weighted metering. This is the type of metering typically found in film cameras. Using this metering mode you eventually learn to judge the light on your subject, along with the light in background (back lit, front lit) and determine whether you need to under expose, neutrally expose, or over expose based on your meter reading.

Many digital cameras also feature a spot metering mode that allows you to meter from a much smaller part of the frame (the very centre for instance). This can be useful in situations like the one you mentioned where you’re outdoors, it’s sunny, and the scene is possibly backlit. In this case you could get the correct exposure by using spot metering and metering right off your subjects’ face.

One final thing to mention is that if you’re shooting in manual mode and the light isn’t changing very quickly then you can always just check the photos on the back of your camera to see if you’re getting the exposure you want.

- Rob

Are you printing the photos on your own printer? If so you could use the Print module in Lightroom to easily manage printing your photos at different sizes.

If you’re submitting these photos to be printed at a print shop then you’ll need to export them as tiffs or jpegs. In this case it depends where you’re getting them printed. Some printers allow you to submit full resolution photos online and adjust the crop in a web app (like Costco). Pro printers (like WHCC) have a program (ROES) that you download and install on your computer that handles cropping and photo upload.

Another option is resizing your photos to exactly the size you want (cropping to 8×10, adjusting the image size to 10 inches on the long side, at 300 pixels per inch (PPI)). I usually need to do this when I’m printing a photo from Photoshop.

- Rob

The only time we apply output sharpening from Lightroom is if we’re printing directly from Lightroom (standard gloss or matte sharpening depending on paper), or if we’re exporting blog sized images from Lightroom (standard or sometimes high sharpening for screen.

If we’re exporting high resolution images for a client then we don’t apply output sharpening (because we don’t know what the exact intended output might be). For albums we sharpen right before print, when the final details (size, paper type, images) have been confirmed. We don’t worry about sharpening on the proof PDF, as it’s not a final product, and only for clients to check layout/image selection.

- Rob

For our setup we have one computer is a “server” workstation. This computer contains all our RAW photos as well as all our derivative files (JPEGS, album designs, business documents, personal stuff etc.). Basically a copy of all our data sits in this one server computer (the data is backed up against hard drive failures and a copy of the data is also swapped offsite on a regular basis). We’ve found it’s just easier to manage data when it’s all stored on one computer.

Having the one server computer makes it easy to connect to this computer from our multiple other computers (one other desktop computer, and Lauren and I both have laptops). We connect to the server through our network. If we’re doing light work with our laptops it’s usually fine for us to connect to the server over wifi. All our Lightroom editing gets done on the server workstation (since the Lightroom catalog cannot be networked).

In instances where we’ve needed to work on RAW processing at the same time then we’ll import photos onto the other desktop computer’s Lightroom catalog and once editing is complete we can sync back any changes made to the main server workstation.

- Rob

 Got a question? Head over to the Questions & Answers page and yours might be next to hit the site!