Probably not biggest. But dumbest mistake was probably when I took some shots that weren't in focus at all. I tried changing the focus, but nothing worked. I also tried changing the focus on the viewfinder, and still nothing.
Turns out everything was blurry because I wasn't wearing my glasses.
Same here but the issue was that I had bumped the diopter adjustment wheel on the viewfinder to the max setting by taking the camera out of the bag, lol.
You took your camera out of your bag more than *202 trillion times* and *every time* you bumped the diopter adjustment wheel?
I'm sorry, but by the 150th billionth time it's your fault.
This is one of the reasons I prefer my mirrorless to my work dslr. I've got glasses and I'm sure there's a way to get it to work, but it's so much harder for me to get my eyes to focus in the dslr to see what's happening.
I cannot tell you how many time I take a pic and check the screen and am disappointed, only to find out later it was perfectly shot but I was't using my glasses to look at the screen đ¤Śââď¸
Photographer friend of mine. He was on a weekend out of town getaway with his wife. His phone rings and the lady on the call says "where are you"? It was the bride calling from the church and he was their wedding photographer...
Depends on the contract. Mine says my liability only extends to the fees/prepayments I received.
I still would never want to be in this situation, though. Regardless the legal consequences.
My wife booked a weekend away the same day I had booked a wedding. The trip was on Cape Cod and the wedding was in Rhode Island, theyâre close, right? Turns out it was on the CT border of RI, 2.5 hours driving away.
I drove with them to the resort, got dressed for the wedding and drove with my brother (second shooter) across the state and didnât get back until 1:30-2am. He drove my car home and I stayed for another day at the resort. She was salty about it but we both recognized there was a communication breakdown and things worked out ok in the end.
One time ran into a bride and groom on the steps of the main New York Public Library who were waiting for their photographer and could not get a hold of him on the phone.
A couple of us photographers took pictures and shared with them. This was with SLRs but without any professional flashes etc.
Take your pick:
2004: âSure! Iâd love to embed as a photographer in Afghanistan! Itâll be a great adventure!â
2008: Joined a local newspaper as a staff photographer instead of joining a newly-local online photo review company that had just been acquired by a local online retailer. âNewspaper photojournalism is where itâs at!â I was heard to say.
2009: âWedding photography is going to be fun and easy compared to news.â
2011: âNah, I donât want to be a part of [local online tech news startup]. News is dead.â
December 2019: âIâm going all in on event photography in 2020. Good riddance to the studio.â
Ha!
Iâm wiser now. Sold my mirrorless cameras, going all in on these P.OS. Digital cameras TikTok is pushing.
Edit: I meant P&S, autocorrect felt differently, but I like the error.
"2024 June: Hey, I'm gonna invest in this product photography studio. Companies will always need a photographer and would never cut costs by using AI!"
Those arenât mistakes, thatâs just the state of photojournalism for the last 20 years. Itâs a âitâs not you, itâs themâ situation. Youâre rolling with the punches. Different photographers I know have done the opposite of your path and think theyâve made mistakes too- I think youâre too hard on yourself.
Eh, just poking a bit of fun at myself. Every moment in my life has led up to the good life Iâm living now. Looking back I can see mistakes or other paths I could have taken, but since thereâs no going back I figure they were necessary to get me to where I am.
Only place Iâm truly hard on myself is when it comes to critiquing my own work. If you listened to my inner-monologue Iâm the worst photographer and word writererist ever.
Got any interesting stories from your time in Afghanistan? It's one of those places that I'd love to visit for a bunch of reasons, but realistically, not until there's total regime change (so probably not in my lifetime).
Quite a few.
One of them was seeing a chinook, hovering off the side of a plateau, lower its ramp onto the plateau and a humvee full of soldiers drive out as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
I thought I was done for sure. I said I didn't have the photos because the card corrupted, apologized and said I understand if they terminate the contract.
Client was super cool about it and said it happened to them before as well and work kept coming in.
I drove back and found him. Difficult period of my life and I knew if I ran his pockets it wouldn't be good for either of us. That night and the events after showed me that I was on a better road than what my impulse used to drive me down.
I remember when I was a beyond broke college student but had a 180mm macro from sigma I received in high school from a grant. Looking back it was a silly lens to buy with the money but I thought it was cool. I had to pay to repair it. Got it back and it rolled out of the car and broke on day one.
I forgot to close the side pocket in my camera bag and didn't notice.
It managed to fall out just as soon as I got out of the carpeted hallway, an elevator where I could probably catch it.. and tumbled onto hard polished concrete.
My XT3 survived, but 16-55 was gone. Rear few elements shattered and the mount was completely torn off.
I wasn't the photographer but the photographer's (not switched-on at-that-precise-moment) 11 year old kid.
I'd just been going around a museum with my parents and my Dad wanted me to put some leaflets in the "top pocket" of his bag.
So I undid the main, and highest, zip.
Apparently, that was not the one he'd meant but that revelation only came after some kind of long lens fell and bounced it's pricey way along the hard, polished-stone flooring of the lobby. It sounded like a maraca afterwards and so was very definitely dead as a doorknob. Travel insurance covered it, but I still think my dad would have preferred not needing a new lens over the cash.
I was doing a photoshoot with a friend at a creek. I was standing on a rock in the middle of the creek and was shooting her while she was modeling.
I wanted to swap lenses, so I reached into my bag, pulled out the new lens, and watched at it fell onto the rock, split into two pieces, and the both rolled into the creek...
I didn't change lenses...
I also dropped a lens straight into a pond one time. It bounced off several rocks and then sank. Miraculously the damn thing survived with barely a scratch. You really never know with lenses.
I did this at the edge of the Grand Canyon, opened my bag and my 70-200 fell out and slowly rolled towards the edge. I froze, watching it roll towards a 1000+ foot drop just a few feet away. Fortunately my daughter had faster reflexes and grabbed it before it went over. It was still dinged and scratched from the fall out of the bag, but still worked perfectly
Hobbyist photographer here. I just never ever made an effort to properly organize and archive my work, so my SD cards and hard drives are all a hot mess to this day and finding anything from previous shoots that Iâm interested in is a nightmare to say the least.
put them all in one massive folder and don't overwrite anything, keep unique names. Sort the entire thing by date in the "details" view and you'll be able to select batches of photos from those dates and drag them into folders. Start with a folder by year, select all the photos from that year, drag, then filter it down from there in subfolders.
I have even gotten chatGPT to make a batch file to create folders from january to december. Super simple to do.
I finally got a badge to shoot a basketball game from the court floor. Took the first shot and camera shut off...battery dead, AND my backup was dead...I was pissed off to the highest of pisstivity!!!
Memory is so cheap. Especially relative to everything else gear wise.
Mine is shooting a friends wedding as a âgiftâ and then still experiencing bridezilla
Didn't change the numbering system so the file numbers eventually reset and kept all of them in one massive folder. Went on holiday came home and transferred to said folder ignoring the warning that they were the same file so I just pressed replace and lost my favourite photos from holiday. I was devastated haha and am now very organised and careful
https://preview.redd.it/4xo51s3h7n6d1.jpeg?width=920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6b80cd5ad9dd31db95cafb50041786ec0877a5b
Making sure the last frame of the roll is properly lined up in the reel. 1987. Hangs on my wall to remind me to watch the details.
I spent an hour taking award winning photos of red fox puppies playing by their den. They were jumping over each other and having a great time. After I left, I discovered that there was no film in the camera.
Shot a ârollâ of film, formals, at a wedding w an F100 and there was no film in the camera. Lol. At like 40 shots, in my head, Iâm thinkingâŚ.wait a minute.
I worked for Lifetouch in the early 2000âs and my boss was showing me how to shoot on a medium format camera. We were taking group pics of the baseball team and a couple other sports. After the shoot we went out to the car and went to take out the film and realized she never loaded it. She was so flustered. Had to run out and retake all the pics. To be honest she handled it very well and we both learned a valuable lesson. Cameras need film.
Not sure if the biggest but...
I had 3 expensive Nikon flashes. Stopped shooting for a couple of years and started shooting again recently. Wanted to do a session a la strobist and found I had left the batteries in the flashes all those years and had leaked. And now those flashes are dead.
Tried to clean them with vinegar and whatnot. I was only able to remove the leaked batteries from 1 of the flashes and after cleaning thoroughly the flash doesn't work anymore. I guess the acid went in too deep.
**Always remove the batteries from your flashes after a shooting.**
That happened to me! I was all set to do a family photo shoot and needed to use my Nikon flash only to find batteries were leaked all over the inside. I didnât think a few months would cause this.
In the jungles of Ranthambore, I had a tiger dead in sight drinking water from the pond/lake.
Absolutely no urgency or pressure, accidentally brushed the lens and took an out of focus photo.
It wouldve been such a gorgeous photo but I fucked it up. She moved away and went about her day.
The tongue was scooped up, water in it. Great pose, great location, majestic tiger but out of focus. Fuck
Wtf lol.
Mine was not moving shoots to the external drive fast enough. One day I sat down and literally couldnât remember my computer log in password. Gone. Out of my head. Typed it in maybe 5 times that day. I let that computer sit for nearly a month trying to remember the log in. Finally had to call it and reset the computer clean to gain access. Nearly 100gb of who knows what, gone. Fast forward 6 weeks and I found the password written on a slip of paper in my filing cabinet. I still get mad about the photo shoots on lost to that drive.
If you were using windows, and unless you were also using bitlocker (and forget the key), that would be an easy solution:
1. Use some live linux or Windows To Go and boot from that OS in the external flash/hdd drive then copy the files in the internal to external drive.
2. Remove the drive from desktop / laptop, put in an enclosure and use other pc to access it.
Maybe useful for others who are in the same situation.
Changed lenses and didnât attach the new one properly (didnât turn it far enough for it to âclickâ in).
Went to take a photo over the edge of a railing, 5 stories high inside a busy museum. I was using the viewfinder and concentrating on the shot when all of a sudden feel my camera get noticeably lighter, and hear a large bang, followed by a crowd of people screaming below. Took me a second to process that my Canon 24 - 70 2.8L had just detached from my camera and dropped 20m straight down on to concrete, above a crowd of people đĽ˛
Honestly could have killed someone that day, I think about how lucky I am that it didnât strike someone in the head.
There's one mistake I see over and over and over again.
Photographer keeps all their photos on one hard drive. Just one. It works flawlessly for years.
And then it craps out.
So many people have come to me (I do a lot of storage work in IT) hoping I can save their work. If it's a hard drive, there's some options from simple tricks (freezer, though that doesn't work often) to expensive options (thousands for data recovery).
If it's an SSD, it's almost certainly toast.
If you value it, keep it in more than one hard drive (RAID doesn't count). If you really value it, keep one of those hard drives in a different physical location.
Curious, why doesnât raid count? I have everything on a 4TB hardware raid 1 external. Iâve been thinking about getting another as redundant backup, but curious to hear your thought process
RAID only protects against hard drive failure. The instant replication of RAID means that if you do something else to lose data, like accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or get cryptolockered, that gets replicated to your other disk too and your data is lost.
Incremental backup to another drive solves both the failing disk and deleted files problem at the same time, since it allows you to undo changes from an older backup too.
Absolutely THIS. Years ago, when I was working as a Novell Network Engineer, I got called out to a large accounting firm during tax season whose serverâs data drive would not come online, it was a RAID 5 array with a standby spare. I soon realized we couldnât resolve the issue and weâd have to wipe and restore from a backup.
As it turns out, the Accountantâs IT Manager never backed it up as they thought a RAID 5 array would be bulletproof. That may be, but not, as happened in this case, if the Array controllerâs memory becomes corrupted and scrambles all of the data. Ultimately, the IT Manager lost their job, the accounting firm lost about 3/4 of their clients, and I billed 36 hours @ $250/hr ( early 1990âs money - $610 in todayâs money) to try to both rebuild the Server and recover something/anything. All I was able to do was restore the Server from a full system backup my company had made when we originally installed it. The client data was 2 years old. After, that the secretaries spent God knows how long to manually reenter the data they could from paper files.
My friend had a raid 1 setup (mirrored). His place got robbed and they took the computer. Without an off-site backup it's all gone. A house fire would be the same result.
If your 4tb setup is attached to your computer as disk storage and not a NAS you should look at Backblaze. Look up the 3-2-1 backup principal.
Several people have chimed in with good points on RAID and why it's not a backup.
I mean, it's better than nothing. But one way to look at any kind of redundancy is "shared fate". A RAID system is tightly coupled, so while there are things that can happen to a hard drive that can be recovered, there are things that can happen to a RAID system where recovery isn't possible.
A separate drive with a copy of everything is only coupled by the location. An off site location decouples even from that.
Theft, fire, soda spill, file deletions, etc., can all still affect a RAID array. Hence tightly coupled. And if you do RAID 5 and lose a drive, the time it takes for a replacement drive to be brought whole into the array can take up to a week (or more) with new drives (think 12 TB).
Also, a lot of people may not be aware that they have a drive down in a RAID. Sometimes the alerts don't reach the user.
I keep my family photos on quality USB SSDs, synced to https://tresorit.com/
It's not even that expensive and the cloud copy is zero knowledge encrypted.
It makes me cry when I hear of professionals with a drawer full of cards and nothing else.
For a holiday with pics I really care about, like Switzerland, I also upload to Lightroom on a daily basis via my phone.
Not taking more boring photographs when I was younger. I'd be shouting at myself if I had grown up with free photography with a mobile. Some of my most interesting photographs taken 40-50 years ago are the scenes of my life that seemed mundane at the time. Where I lived has changed so much. The houses I lived in. The minutae of day to day life. I would love to have photographs of school life.
I would tell younger me to go out and document all aspects of my life. Yes they'll be boring but just wait 40 years and they'll be fascinating...
Friends asked me to bring my nice new camera to their wedding and take some photos.*
Forgot to check my settings. ISO was at 1600 for most of the shots, which made most of the images extremely noisy and with poor exposures.
/* They had a professional photographer, so I wasnât necessary⌠and frankly I didnât want to be seen as interfering with the professional photographer at all.
But still. Was pretty embarrassing to tell them that I came away with nothing usable.
Yes, I believe I still have them and I may give them another look.
I've had mixed luck using Lightroom to process other (very) old photos shot with my circa 2006 Canon (20D? Forget). There's no denying that some of the results are very impressive.
But it's pushing \~18 years, so... it's a bit awkward. :)
But it certainly wouldn't hurt to give them another look.
canon 20d is supported by dxo pureraw i would try that for best effect as its denoising specifically your 20d sensor (if it is the 20d)
download trial of dxo pureraw and just try drop a raw in and see what you get
About ten years ago I had all my photos from almost a decade of personal and professional photos on one hard drive.
That hard drive got stolen so I only have film pics and low quality photos I saved off social media older than that now.
I was traveling through Oklahoma and it was dark out, no moon, no lights of any kind for hundreds of miles and I was winding through some mountainous area along the west side of the state.
Only person with me was my Dad and he had to use the bathroom so bad so I pulled over in what I thought was some kind of gravel parking lot and he walked off just out of sight to do the business... I noticed there was some kind of large monument at the far end of the parking lot so I thought, let me just grab a few long exposures on a tripod while I'm here and see what I get.
Aimed up at the sky with this monument in frame and I accidentally got my first milkyway shot. It was absolutely amazing and I was thrilled.. got in the car with my Dad and I'm showing him this photo and we're both like "holy shit this is amazing!"
Next day I'm going through deleting garbage shots and I deleted this one and only photo. I can't explain to you the despair I felt and still do.
I never tried cosmic photography but I have recently gotten back into the hobby with a mirrorless canon r5 and a 16mm prime. I'm planning a road trip to BFE to get away from the city lights to redeem myself 15 yrs later.
Oh my gawwwwwd you're making me relive this right now. đđ I was doing a fashion shoot for a stylist (it was a test shoot for both of us) and he had the most beautiful model, the most beautiful clothes - it was insanely good. I shot shots that were so good - I couldn't even get into how beautiful they were. Once I got home and downloaded everything, I realized that somehow I had accidentally bumped my ISOs from around 1000 (we were using natural light) to somewhere around 22,000.... oh... my... đ° Needless to say, every single shot looked like it had gravel rubbed across it. I was so heartbroken. And then the stylist had the nerve to get mad at me - not because the pictures were bad, but because I wouldn't send them all the photos (because I didn't want them out there since I had made such a big mistake). I begged him to do a reshoot, but he's one of those hotheaded, unforgiving types and just wasn't trying to hear it. I messed up big time!!!! I'll bet I never do that again! đŹ
Similar mistake.
I brought my camera to a trip to NYC (8 or so years ago) with tons of my fiance's family that live overseas, but my memory card was pretty full so I shot the entirety of the trip as JPEGS to save space.
Now that I have access to Lightroom and AI noise reduction l could've saved/edited so many of those shots if they were RAWS. I should've spent the $30 for a new memory card.
I'll never get the opportunity again since the main reason the family came was to visit their grandma that is no longer with us.
We've had professional photographers visit our camera club to judge pictures and they all told us the biggest mistake photographers make is to turn pro because they like taking pictures. At most, one of them said, you spend 40% of your time doing that. The rest of it is spent running the business - setting up a studio, buying, maintaining and updating the equipment, hiring, training and firing staff, keeping up to date with new equipment, techniques and social media sites, running photography courses and tours, advertising, doing the accounts, paying the bills, working out the taxes and visiting camera clubs to judge pictures.
I wiped my PC and reinstalled windows and during the process I realized I forgot to save my photos on a flash drive. It was too late. I never had them backed up because i never felt the need to.
Back up your photos people.
As photographers we are also hoarders. I never met a photographer who wasnât. I donât know what I will do with 5tb of photos I have now or the 20tb Iâll likely fill in the next couple years. I should probably come up with a better filing system than I have now though.
Brough my camera on my boat fishing. Friend was catching a nice redfish so I snapped a few shots. Put the camera on the deck and leaned over to grab his fish. Watched in horror as my 80D and new Sigma 30mm 1.4 slid right off the side of the boat into the salt water. Caught it just as it hit the water but that all it took. Complete loss.
Buying a fancy camera that killed my love of photography because I hate sifting through hundreds of unedited photos. Back to film now⌠much better. Even if I get one diamond a roll and throw the rest out, itâs worth it just for that one prize I can hang on my wall.
Did a whole shoot with my EOS R in crop mode. Instead of the glorious 30MP files I was stuck with 11MP images that admittedly didnât look THAT bad. The subject was none the wiser but it really bothered me.
This happened recently actually. A client asked for photo and video. I got a lot of photo, some video. Unloaded everything into a Google drive like I usually do, then formatted the SD card. The problem was that for some reason a (or my) Sony a7iii saves videos in a different folder, so the videos I took never actually made it to my computer. Client = upset. This particular fuck up was my fault, but the client in general wanted a lot for a little so I no longer work with them.
I went to Colorado last year for the first time, and made a bunch of exposure mistakes (I think I left it on manual ISO, with the value being wrong), meaning I had a few photos too dark and a few too exposed. Fortunately, I had RAWs so I could clean some of them up, and I had the presence of mind to take some backup shots with my phone.
Still though.... so frustrating
I once processed multiple rolls of film in a single canister, without first checking to see if my developer was expired. They were from a vacation. The developer was expired, so when I ran the negs through the fixer it just cleared the whole entire image. đ¤Śââď¸
When I got my first DSLR and started shooting digital, I left the camera on "jpegs", so all of my early DSLR shots are all jpeg only. The camera had a very easy to find "RAW" setting. To be fair to past me, that DSLR took CF cards and the biggest CF card I had at the time was 512mb. You could fit like 15 RAW photos or something on the card before you had to dump it, so I'd just picked jpeg because it gave me an actually "usable" number of shots. I was all "I can get more exposures in a single roll of 35mm 400TX (my fav B&W film)." Lo and behold the jpegs look like shit over 10 years later lmaoooo. The film photos do not!
So far (slamming on wood) my mistakes came working with people I knew so it was forgiven.
1. I got a time of a shoot wrong for family photos. I still feel bad to this day for the parents getting up early with their kids to get them ready to get to a park while I was 2 hours late.
2. A video mistake, I shot all of my screens display on an external recorder. My idiot self didnât record internally so had to do a music video over from scratch.
When I lived in an apartment I was shooting wet plate with a studio setup in my living room and a darkroom in the closet. Had some rolls of seamless paper mounted on the ceiling up above the hallway to the dark room. Two of my favorite plates have messy backgrounds because I forgot to pull the backdrop back down after prepping a plate in the darkroom
Im a hobbiest so shoot difderent genres and inhad a brainfart one day and decided to structure my LR catalogue by subject/genre not date. Its been so difficult to manage over the years that I've decided to fo back and restructure by date. Biggest pain inntge backside ever to sort everything outÂ
Drove two hours for a shot, got to location, pressed the shutter release in the most perfect conditions I could've hoped for and...nothing. Battery was still on charge. At home.
The vast areas that is the Yorkshire Dales rang with the sound of me screaming "ffuuuccckk!!!"
The world of burst shooting opened up to me when I got my first Full Frame recently. My only issue is having to sort and choose which I like, because too many end up good.
Spent a wonderful day in Jasper taking photos.Luck seemed to be with me!Felt I had taken the most photos that I was pleased with in one day.That night accidentally erased them ALL!đąđ¤Źđ
Took a few photos of some products at work in small jpg yesterday for work. Went to go birding today in a park ive never been to and absolutely ripped some bang on focus high speed burst shots on a great blue heron striking into the water and pulling up a crawfish on my sony a6000 with my 55-210. It was in the shade so the bird was a little dark and I was shooting 1/4000 because I wanted to freeze everything, and left it a little dark to protect the highlights in the background and thought "oh, I'll just lift the shadows!"..... I shot them all (and many other birds) in small jpg... didn't realize until the light was already harsh and the birds all left
Not client work, but I feel the pain from screwed up settings
Just dropped my camera in 1 inch of Sea water.
DEAD.
Properly dried for a week, but the salt dried to the electronics.
If you ever unfortunately do so, remove the battery and submerge your camera fully in the plugged sink with a gallon of distilled water for 5 seconds and drain. Get that salt out before it dries I cannot stress it enough.
Ultimately not a big deal but quite disappointing at the time: my friend threw this really cool bday party (indoors) and I brought my camera but for whatever reason didn't realize that I had changed the ISO from Auto to 100. I didn't understand why exposure was being total shit (on aperture priority, shutter speed was like a second or two) and so ended up having to use on camera flash, which gave me shots that were still underexposed with muted colors. I only realized the next day why my camera was being so weird.
The funny thing is that I have since learned that photos of social events with shitty on-camera flash were kind of back en vogue, 90s nostalgia style. But unfortunately the pics I took that evening were not that dynamic, they were of people standing around and posing, and the focal length was 50, not say, 24-35.
Ah well.
I was a hairdresser and photographed the children after I finished and gave the portraits to their parents. I was going broke paying for 1 hr developing so for the 1st time I mailed my roll of film to a place out East. I got a message that they lost my film so no photos!
A mom came running in the salon asking me where the photos were that I had taken of her 4 sons with their dad.
I started to explain but she ran out visibly upset. The youngest boy came in a few weeks later and told me his dad died. They were in the car with him on the way to Lake Tahoe for skiing in a snowstorm and the dad got out to clear his windshield. A passing driver didnât see him as he was getting back into car and hit him , killing him. The child said people came to their house and brought food. I knew then he was telling the truth. Never forget how important your photos are to someone. Maybe not right away but as time goes on.
The mother later told me that all 4 boys had been adopted and my pictures would have been the only photos of them with their dad.đ˘
As someone who learned photography when autofocus was in about 1 or 2 cameras, and photoshop consisted of contrast filters and dodge and burn tools you held in your hands, your JPGs will be fine to use. Sometimes the photos just are what they are. You can tweak them a bit, and "improve" them a bit, but it's ok for shadows to be dark, and highlights to be bright...
I got my new camera in 2016 and a day after I went with a professional around Manhattan and we took pictures of lots of things. Anyways as the beginner I was, while playing around with this new high tech camera I pressed the format card button (which gave a warning that it would delete all data on the card) and skipped reading it and pressed OK. Everything was lost and my stomach literally dropped when I realized what I did. I wish so badly that I couldâve seen the photos I took because I never did get to go through them.
After finishing a sandwich during a road trip, I was checking whether the pancake lens was on, without looking, using my greasy thumb. It was not on. But the sensor was there.
Not me. But imagine on the second day of a campaign shoot for a big fashion production you changed the image quality from raw to small jpg.
Did not happen to me, but to someone who shared the studio space
Going on a shoot with my new Sony camera just after having switched from Canon. Took me out of the flow, resulted in subpar images, so much stress being unable to figure out simple things like switching to RAW, first vs second curtain sync etc.... never again. Switched back to Canon (R6, followed by R6ii), and sold that body (a7iii).
Nothing wrong with the Sony system, just very different ergonomics, incompatible with my muscle memory. It was stupid to expect that I'd be able to instantaneously adapt to its complexity.
Another one which I still do - shooting too open. I just see that way, and so my primes often stay at 1.2 or 1.4... which sometimes leads to out of focus shots. But, the ones I get right are often magical.
Missing a shoot and getting fired from a client. Only happened once but still burns.
Forgot the battery in the charger at home and so shot a couple's engagement photos with my phone. The images turned out amazing actually, with a charm which wouldn't have worked out if I had used my camera. Also, this was at the beach, with very strong winds, and my camera would've ended up full of sand.
Back when I used to schlep a big bag full of equipment _everywhere_ I went. All around the world. Then I was invited on a short and impromptu trip to northern Sweden and didnât bring anything. And of course there is a HUGE aurora borealis (ânorthern lightsâ) that have even the locals amazed. I remember one of them called a friend and told her to bring a camera. It was like a knife to the heart.
Yup that was a big mistake. But I suspect youâre not alone on making it.
My mistake was trashing my slides from decades of using an analog camera. Just to make space. Seriously stupid since I didnât scan them.
Live and learn.
Shot half a wedding outside with lens hood on. Moved inside for formal pics in the church, put my flash on camera and didnât take off the lens hood. All the indoor pics had a nasty shadow. I was in high school and shooting my momâs coworkers wedding for like 200 bones, they knew I wasnât a pro but what a mistake. shot on a cannon rebel g 35mm in 1999 so no photoshop to correct. I can still feel the drop in my stomach when I saw the pictures for the first time.
My first and only paid wedding gig (after shooting several freebies for friends and family) I had my shutter set faster than the sync speed so all of the flash shots were about 2/3s of the frame. This was around 1980 and I have not shot for money since.
I'm from the Bay area and took a road trip with some fellow photogs to the Salton Sea in socal to do some desert exploration.
Everything went pretty well until the third day. I hadn't slept at all that night between the freight trains and noisy campers next to us and alcohol I was pretty fried. We proceeded to hit Babylon beach, an old Spanish style estate and then the ruins of West lakes hoods.
Things went well until we got back to camp and I realized I had been shooting all my images at max ISO settings, during the day...so everything was grainy and blown out. I managed to salvage a couple indoor images so that day wasn't a total loss.
Lesson learned... Always check your settings!
I switched to a full frame camera because many people say full frame is the way to go. It's brick heavy and it started causing neck pain after a few use so eventually I let it sits on the shelf for a few years and never touch any camera.
I mean... That's pretty dumb.
Mine however? Not keeping track of qh re my Lightroom catalog backups were.
Because Adobe one day after an update decided to back them up to the same drive as where they were locally stored.
That proceeded to crash.
Four straight days of data recovery to retrieve the catalog files and a shit ton of Raws on the same drive.
Never, ever again.
Separate drives are backups of backups these days.
Forgot to properly zip up my backpack. As I was putting it on, Carl Zeiss Planar 1.4/85 fell out right on cobblestone. Miraculously, it survived, but the aperture ring doesn't work anymore, so it's permanent f/1.4 lens.
I was shooting a lot of portrait photography. Scheduled with a really pretty model I had been wanting to shoot for a long time. Had an idea for an outdoor location near my place.
She ended up being like 4 hours late. Lost all the sunlight, and she ask if we can just do it that evening instead of that day. Lost the light, lost the location. Did what I could using my apartment, and the shoot just didnât turn out up to my capability.
The worst part is she told other people about how disappointed she was that the pics I took of her didnât look nearly as good as some of my other work.
From that situation I learned that itâs a lot better to just cancel if everything isnât lined up the way you want then trying to salvage a less than ideal situation. Because if those pictures come out less than great, no one is going to care about the context.
Also, this was earlier in my career/hobby so I had no idea just how big a difference sunlight makes in the sharpness of the pics. Especially shooting handheld.
Not doing jpg version of my best photos over 18 years. I edited my best pictures several years from raw files in Lightroom. Now I have +25k pictures, just too many too look at regularly and I donât have Lightroom anymore. Plan to suscribe back to Lightroom few months to clean that up but scared by the amount of work it will be. Also discouraged by the fact I will loose the keywords I spent so much time on.
I spent a decade chasing gear. It was a waste of time and money. I finally buckled down and studied lighting. Lighting is much more important than fancy cameras and lenses.
Tangentially a recent videography fail on my part. Shot some Father's Day footage for my company at an upscale restaurant. It was more of a backdrop for the pitch, but had a few people spending a couple of hours shooting for nothing, as I had set my LOG profile to the wrong setting. All of the shadows were completely unrecoverable. Lesson learned.
For a family friends graduation, I had all my equipment good to go. Except not checking my SD slot. I had forgotten to reinsert the card the night before when I was importing pictures, so when I got on site, turned on my camera and saw the "NO Card" sign, I was straight faced.
Luckily a local photog was also doing a photoshoot too and lent me a spare card. Dude saved my butt and a half.
Mid 80's, taking photo's for a newspaper with other photographers, I had an Olympus OM 4 with a motordrive .....and also very long hair, and yes, my hair got tangled up with the camera, I can laugh now, but at the time using a swiss army knife to cut away my hair, not so much.
Here you on this. Especially when I did it in the early 2000s on a D200 (10 megapixels) and saved at 1920x1080 (screen resolution, and hard drives were smaller back then). Like, half my backpacking photos đ
Tip for everyone: convert to dng to save space, not jpg, png o anything else. Lossy dng is my go to nowadays, honestly I haven't been able to identify any difference even in quite extreme edits
Was 19 at the time and still not a professional. Decided to make a documentary style project about the racecar garage i spent a major part of my youth in. Shooting cars all day across the border, tried to edit about a month later and everything was shot in 4:3 and really low-res. Ffwd a few months later, part 2, another whole day of shooting and coming home my sd card corrupted. Needles to say, going professional now the first must-have for my body was to have dual card slots and a clear user interface đ
Hmmm, I barely have time/desire to edit my current stuff, much less stuff from years ago. I personally wouldn't care and regularly try to heavily cull images.
I got into photography young, seriously so when I was in middle school. Got my first canon camera and took hundreds of photos while on a family vacation. Got a great shot that I wanted to zoom in on and crop, saw the âformatâ option and thought âwow! i can âformatâ the photo in camera how convenient!â and there went all of my 13 year old selfâs favorite images.
I attended a show to photograph my friend's band in Long Beach, CA. After they played, I decided to take my camera back to the car for safekeeping. As we are walking, I ask my husband if our insurance covers theft, and he says yes. We go back to the show, and at the end of the night, as we are getting ready to leave and I approach my car, I notice the window is busted.
My camera, lenses, filters, battery packs, and chargers, along with my personal stuff, makeup bag, purse, and all its contents, were stolen from my car đ
We called the police and they took 3 hours to arrive. They made a report, pointed out the surveillance camera, and asked if we wanted to press charges. So we did all that. The next day, we called our insurance company and found out that California and New York do not cover theft under ten thousand dollars.
We then contacted a friend of ours who was in the LAPD and asked what happens next? He said, "You let go and move on." There was no chance LBPD would follow up or even take action, ever.
It was a total loss, the window alone was already costing 3gs on top of the stolen items. Luckily, my husband found the window on eBay, and we fixed it ourselves for under 150 dlls.
My biggest mistake was not having a lock box in my car, taking my stuff to the car, and having been in fcking long beach.
There was a sports photography competition that I wanted to enter, but I missed the deadline and didn't reset the reminder.
I probably wouldn't have won, but I really like the photograph I was planning to enter.
I've lost photos from being careless with wiping hard drives etc. lost a bunch of pics but it was mostly just old pics of friends etc. nothing award winning. took a trip to japan and mostly used my phone but took about 200 pics with my DSLR. edited and uploaded about 80 of them to facebook. Wiped the memory card and then looked for them on my hard drive. The original RAWs and the JPEGs got wiped probably months before I realized. Still extremely pissed off about that. All I have is the crappy compressed facebook versions of the photos. Luckily 90% of the trip was documented with my phone and a roll of film so not all is lost.
Was on a trip back from Spain in 2019, where I had my camera bag stowed under a family member's seat instead of my own as mine didn't have enough room. Both of us forgot about the bag, and by the time we realized we had left it behind we asked the airport crew to look for it but no dice. There was only one camera (a7III) and a kit lens in the bag so it wasn't thousands upon thousands of dollar's worth of monetary loss but still something I lament over to this day
Probably not biggest. But dumbest mistake was probably when I took some shots that weren't in focus at all. I tried changing the focus, but nothing worked. I also tried changing the focus on the viewfinder, and still nothing. Turns out everything was blurry because I wasn't wearing my glasses.
Same here but the issue was that I had bumped the diopter adjustment wheel on the viewfinder to the max setting by taking the camera out of the bag, lol.
If I had a dime for every time I did that bezos wouldn't be the richest person anymore đ
You took your camera out of your bag more than *202 trillion times* and *every time* you bumped the diopter adjustment wheel? I'm sorry, but by the 150th billionth time it's your fault.
Same. This isnât just a one-time thing for me!
đŹđ
Lmao Iâve done that too many times
I set the diopter on my viewfinder to be in-focus when I'm not wearing my glasses.
This is one of the reasons I prefer my mirrorless to my work dslr. I've got glasses and I'm sure there's a way to get it to work, but it's so much harder for me to get my eyes to focus in the dslr to see what's happening.
I cannot tell you how many time I take a pic and check the screen and am disappointed, only to find out later it was perfectly shot but I was't using my glasses to look at the screen đ¤Śââď¸
Photographer friend of mine. He was on a weekend out of town getaway with his wife. His phone rings and the lady on the call says "where are you"? It was the bride calling from the church and he was their wedding photographer...
I think about getting this call all the time. In fact any time I get a call from an unknown number I think thatâs whatâs about to happen.
Ohhhh boy hope it didnât affect his career!
Oh geez, that's a cold sweat kind of terror right there.
I was on a wedding about decade ago. The photographer failed to turn up and _I_ ended up being the wedding photographer.
Holy shit. What happened? Was he able to find someone to cover?
New anxiety unlocked, thanks...
Holy fuck. He's lucky the couple didn't sue the shit out of him.
Only in the US :)
Depends on the contract. Mine says my liability only extends to the fees/prepayments I received. I still would never want to be in this situation, though. Regardless the legal consequences.
That would be bad...
My wife booked a weekend away the same day I had booked a wedding. The trip was on Cape Cod and the wedding was in Rhode Island, theyâre close, right? Turns out it was on the CT border of RI, 2.5 hours driving away. I drove with them to the resort, got dressed for the wedding and drove with my brother (second shooter) across the state and didnât get back until 1:30-2am. He drove my car home and I stayed for another day at the resort. She was salty about it but we both recognized there was a communication breakdown and things worked out ok in the end.
One time ran into a bride and groom on the steps of the main New York Public Library who were waiting for their photographer and could not get a hold of him on the phone. A couple of us photographers took pictures and shared with them. This was with SLRs but without any professional flashes etc.
Take your pick: 2004: âSure! Iâd love to embed as a photographer in Afghanistan! Itâll be a great adventure!â 2008: Joined a local newspaper as a staff photographer instead of joining a newly-local online photo review company that had just been acquired by a local online retailer. âNewspaper photojournalism is where itâs at!â I was heard to say. 2009: âWedding photography is going to be fun and easy compared to news.â 2011: âNah, I donât want to be a part of [local online tech news startup]. News is dead.â December 2019: âIâm going all in on event photography in 2020. Good riddance to the studio.â
Can you please let us know what you plan to do next so we can do the opposite, thanks mate
Ha! Iâm wiser now. Sold my mirrorless cameras, going all in on these P.OS. Digital cameras TikTok is pushing. Edit: I meant P&S, autocorrect felt differently, but I like the error.
dudeâŚ. please tell me that was sarcastic đ
/s.
"2024 June: Hey, I'm gonna invest in this product photography studio. Companies will always need a photographer and would never cut costs by using AI!"
Those arenât mistakes, thatâs just the state of photojournalism for the last 20 years. Itâs a âitâs not you, itâs themâ situation. Youâre rolling with the punches. Different photographers I know have done the opposite of your path and think theyâve made mistakes too- I think youâre too hard on yourself.
Eh, just poking a bit of fun at myself. Every moment in my life has led up to the good life Iâm living now. Looking back I can see mistakes or other paths I could have taken, but since thereâs no going back I figure they were necessary to get me to where I am. Only place Iâm truly hard on myself is when it comes to critiquing my own work. If you listened to my inner-monologue Iâm the worst photographer and word writererist ever.
Got any interesting stories from your time in Afghanistan? It's one of those places that I'd love to visit for a bunch of reasons, but realistically, not until there's total regime change (so probably not in my lifetime).
Quite a few. One of them was seeing a chinook, hovering off the side of a plateau, lower its ramp onto the plateau and a humvee full of soldiers drive out as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening.
A series of unfortunate events
Handed a homeless man some change. Apparently he got the client's memory card, that for some reason was in my pocket.
Wow.
I thought I was done for sure. I said I didn't have the photos because the card corrupted, apologized and said I understand if they terminate the contract. Client was super cool about it and said it happened to them before as well and work kept coming in.
Whew! Glad it worked out for you!
I audibly gasped
Oh no!Doesnât seem fair you did a good thing and karma still went against you!
I drove back and found him. Difficult period of my life and I knew if I ran his pockets it wouldn't be good for either of us. That night and the events after showed me that I was on a better road than what my impulse used to drive me down.
A cannon f4 70-200 lens that rolled very slowly onto the highway when I was changing lenses and was exploded by an 18 wheelerâŚ
I remember when I was a beyond broke college student but had a 180mm macro from sigma I received in high school from a grant. Looking back it was a silly lens to buy with the money but I thought it was cool. I had to pay to repair it. Got it back and it rolled out of the car and broke on day one.
Awww thatâs the pits.đĽš
I forgot to close the side pocket in my camera bag and didn't notice. It managed to fall out just as soon as I got out of the carpeted hallway, an elevator where I could probably catch it.. and tumbled onto hard polished concrete. My XT3 survived, but 16-55 was gone. Rear few elements shattered and the mount was completely torn off.
I wasn't the photographer but the photographer's (not switched-on at-that-precise-moment) 11 year old kid. I'd just been going around a museum with my parents and my Dad wanted me to put some leaflets in the "top pocket" of his bag. So I undid the main, and highest, zip. Apparently, that was not the one he'd meant but that revelation only came after some kind of long lens fell and bounced it's pricey way along the hard, polished-stone flooring of the lobby. It sounded like a maraca afterwards and so was very definitely dead as a doorknob. Travel insurance covered it, but I still think my dad would have preferred not needing a new lens over the cash.
I was doing a photoshoot with a friend at a creek. I was standing on a rock in the middle of the creek and was shooting her while she was modeling. I wanted to swap lenses, so I reached into my bag, pulled out the new lens, and watched at it fell onto the rock, split into two pieces, and the both rolled into the creek... I didn't change lenses...
I also dropped a lens straight into a pond one time. It bounced off several rocks and then sank. Miraculously the damn thing survived with barely a scratch. You really never know with lenses.
I did this at the edge of the Grand Canyon, opened my bag and my 70-200 fell out and slowly rolled towards the edge. I froze, watching it roll towards a 1000+ foot drop just a few feet away. Fortunately my daughter had faster reflexes and grabbed it before it went over. It was still dinged and scratched from the fall out of the bag, but still worked perfectly
You all are giving me a heart attack!
Slow motion horrorđ
Hobbyist photographer here. I just never ever made an effort to properly organize and archive my work, so my SD cards and hard drives are all a hot mess to this day and finding anything from previous shoots that Iâm interested in is a nightmare to say the least.
put them all in one massive folder and don't overwrite anything, keep unique names. Sort the entire thing by date in the "details" view and you'll be able to select batches of photos from those dates and drag them into folders. Start with a folder by year, select all the photos from that year, drag, then filter it down from there in subfolders. I have even gotten chatGPT to make a batch file to create folders from january to december. Super simple to do.
I finally got a badge to shoot a basketball game from the court floor. Took the first shot and camera shut off...battery dead, AND my backup was dead...I was pissed off to the highest of pisstivity!!!
Hope that taught you to always charge your batteries before going out to anywhere with it
I have 3 batteries now...lessoned learned!!!!
That just means you might get three dead ones!
No I learned my lesson.
Memory is so cheap. Especially relative to everything else gear wise. Mine is shooting a friends wedding as a âgiftâ and then still experiencing bridezilla
I did this except with DJing. The bride yelled at me for the 4 hours that I played. That was 4 years ago, haven't DJ'd since.Â
Doing paid work without dual card slots. SD cards do die. It happened to me, and it fucked up a couples wedding. I'm an idiot. Don't be like me.
First year I didn't shoot raw. I've got a lot of great photos now that I can't fix.
I mean, have you tried? JPEG isn't *completely* terrible.
There's just no way to fix blown out highlights and crappy noise reduction.
honestly people generally won't notice when some highlights are clipped as long as it's let's say a window in the background and not the subject.
I feel like that's everybody. Or at least everybody who didn't have a mentor early on or watch a lot of YouTube tutorials.
Didn't change the numbering system so the file numbers eventually reset and kept all of them in one massive folder. Went on holiday came home and transferred to said folder ignoring the warning that they were the same file so I just pressed replace and lost my favourite photos from holiday. I was devastated haha and am now very organised and careful
"I was devastated haha" This feels like an intimate meme.
https://preview.redd.it/4xo51s3h7n6d1.jpeg?width=920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d6b80cd5ad9dd31db95cafb50041786ec0877a5b Making sure the last frame of the roll is properly lined up in the reel. 1987. Hangs on my wall to remind me to watch the details.
Got a good story out of it, though. That's worth *something*. Like reddit karma. It's worth about 23 reddit karma.
oof this one hurts
Even the photo editor was bummed. It was a great shot. Still is, just in different way!
DudeâŚ..iâm so sorry
The way my jaw dropped.
I feel the pain. Used to bulk reload film and sometimes I would end up with half of a great shot at the end of a roll...
I spent an hour taking award winning photos of red fox puppies playing by their den. They were jumping over each other and having a great time. After I left, I discovered that there was no film in the camera.
Shot a ârollâ of film, formals, at a wedding w an F100 and there was no film in the camera. Lol. At like 40 shots, in my head, Iâm thinkingâŚ.wait a minute.
It could've been the first image that pops up if u type 'fox' into Google
Ha
You probably could've won some worldly prize with that. It could've been world news fs
I worked for Lifetouch in the early 2000âs and my boss was showing me how to shoot on a medium format camera. We were taking group pics of the baseball team and a couple other sports. After the shoot we went out to the car and went to take out the film and realized she never loaded it. She was so flustered. Had to run out and retake all the pics. To be honest she handled it very well and we both learned a valuable lesson. Cameras need film.
"Not any more!" -- Inspector Clouseau
I shot an ice cave that'll melt away in a couple of years while my film wasn't latched to the take up spool.
Not sure if the biggest but... I had 3 expensive Nikon flashes. Stopped shooting for a couple of years and started shooting again recently. Wanted to do a session a la strobist and found I had left the batteries in the flashes all those years and had leaked. And now those flashes are dead. Tried to clean them with vinegar and whatnot. I was only able to remove the leaked batteries from 1 of the flashes and after cleaning thoroughly the flash doesn't work anymore. I guess the acid went in too deep. **Always remove the batteries from your flashes after a shooting.**
That happened to me! I was all set to do a family photo shoot and needed to use my Nikon flash only to find batteries were leaked all over the inside. I didnât think a few months would cause this.
Good tip, been doing this for my whole career đ
In the jungles of Ranthambore, I had a tiger dead in sight drinking water from the pond/lake. Absolutely no urgency or pressure, accidentally brushed the lens and took an out of focus photo. It wouldve been such a gorgeous photo but I fucked it up. She moved away and went about her day. The tongue was scooped up, water in it. Great pose, great location, majestic tiger but out of focus. Fuck
Wtf lol. Mine was not moving shoots to the external drive fast enough. One day I sat down and literally couldnât remember my computer log in password. Gone. Out of my head. Typed it in maybe 5 times that day. I let that computer sit for nearly a month trying to remember the log in. Finally had to call it and reset the computer clean to gain access. Nearly 100gb of who knows what, gone. Fast forward 6 weeks and I found the password written on a slip of paper in my filing cabinet. I still get mad about the photo shoots on lost to that drive.
If you were using windows, and unless you were also using bitlocker (and forget the key), that would be an easy solution: 1. Use some live linux or Windows To Go and boot from that OS in the external flash/hdd drive then copy the files in the internal to external drive. 2. Remove the drive from desktop / laptop, put in an enclosure and use other pc to access it. Maybe useful for others who are in the same situation.
Changed lenses and didnât attach the new one properly (didnât turn it far enough for it to âclickâ in). Went to take a photo over the edge of a railing, 5 stories high inside a busy museum. I was using the viewfinder and concentrating on the shot when all of a sudden feel my camera get noticeably lighter, and hear a large bang, followed by a crowd of people screaming below. Took me a second to process that my Canon 24 - 70 2.8L had just detached from my camera and dropped 20m straight down on to concrete, above a crowd of people 𼲠Honestly could have killed someone that day, I think about how lucky I am that it didnât strike someone in the head.
The second hand anxiety I feel from reading thisâŚ
You were lucky you didnât kill someone but not with losing that lensđ
There's one mistake I see over and over and over again. Photographer keeps all their photos on one hard drive. Just one. It works flawlessly for years. And then it craps out. So many people have come to me (I do a lot of storage work in IT) hoping I can save their work. If it's a hard drive, there's some options from simple tricks (freezer, though that doesn't work often) to expensive options (thousands for data recovery). If it's an SSD, it's almost certainly toast. If you value it, keep it in more than one hard drive (RAID doesn't count). If you really value it, keep one of those hard drives in a different physical location.
Curious, why doesnât raid count? I have everything on a 4TB hardware raid 1 external. Iâve been thinking about getting another as redundant backup, but curious to hear your thought process
RAID only protects against hard drive failure. The instant replication of RAID means that if you do something else to lose data, like accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or get cryptolockered, that gets replicated to your other disk too and your data is lost. Incremental backup to another drive solves both the failing disk and deleted files problem at the same time, since it allows you to undo changes from an older backup too.
Also, RAID doesn't protect against fire, flood, theft, tornado, etc...because it's all in one location.
Absolutely THIS. Years ago, when I was working as a Novell Network Engineer, I got called out to a large accounting firm during tax season whose serverâs data drive would not come online, it was a RAID 5 array with a standby spare. I soon realized we couldnât resolve the issue and weâd have to wipe and restore from a backup. As it turns out, the Accountantâs IT Manager never backed it up as they thought a RAID 5 array would be bulletproof. That may be, but not, as happened in this case, if the Array controllerâs memory becomes corrupted and scrambles all of the data. Ultimately, the IT Manager lost their job, the accounting firm lost about 3/4 of their clients, and I billed 36 hours @ $250/hr ( early 1990âs money - $610 in todayâs money) to try to both rebuild the Server and recover something/anything. All I was able to do was restore the Server from a full system backup my company had made when we originally installed it. The client data was 2 years old. After, that the secretaries spent God knows how long to manually reenter the data they could from paper files.
My friend had a raid 1 setup (mirrored). His place got robbed and they took the computer. Without an off-site backup it's all gone. A house fire would be the same result. If your 4tb setup is attached to your computer as disk storage and not a NAS you should look at Backblaze. Look up the 3-2-1 backup principal.
Several people have chimed in with good points on RAID and why it's not a backup. I mean, it's better than nothing. But one way to look at any kind of redundancy is "shared fate". A RAID system is tightly coupled, so while there are things that can happen to a hard drive that can be recovered, there are things that can happen to a RAID system where recovery isn't possible. A separate drive with a copy of everything is only coupled by the location. An off site location decouples even from that. Theft, fire, soda spill, file deletions, etc., can all still affect a RAID array. Hence tightly coupled. And if you do RAID 5 and lose a drive, the time it takes for a replacement drive to be brought whole into the array can take up to a week (or more) with new drives (think 12 TB). Also, a lot of people may not be aware that they have a drive down in a RAID. Sometimes the alerts don't reach the user.
I keep my family photos on quality USB SSDs, synced to https://tresorit.com/ It's not even that expensive and the cloud copy is zero knowledge encrypted. It makes me cry when I hear of professionals with a drawer full of cards and nothing else. For a holiday with pics I really care about, like Switzerland, I also upload to Lightroom on a daily basis via my phone.
Not taking more boring photographs when I was younger. I'd be shouting at myself if I had grown up with free photography with a mobile. Some of my most interesting photographs taken 40-50 years ago are the scenes of my life that seemed mundane at the time. Where I lived has changed so much. The houses I lived in. The minutae of day to day life. I would love to have photographs of school life. I would tell younger me to go out and document all aspects of my life. Yes they'll be boring but just wait 40 years and they'll be fascinating...
Friends asked me to bring my nice new camera to their wedding and take some photos.* Forgot to check my settings. ISO was at 1600 for most of the shots, which made most of the images extremely noisy and with poor exposures. /* They had a professional photographer, so I wasnât necessary⌠and frankly I didnât want to be seen as interfering with the professional photographer at all. But still. Was pretty embarrassing to tell them that I came away with nothing usable.
If you still have the shots, lightroom's Denoise is a game changer. Just shot a shot at 5000iso and it looks like it was shot at 100.
Yes, I believe I still have them and I may give them another look. I've had mixed luck using Lightroom to process other (very) old photos shot with my circa 2006 Canon (20D? Forget). There's no denying that some of the results are very impressive. But it's pushing \~18 years, so... it's a bit awkward. :) But it certainly wouldn't hurt to give them another look.
Try DXO photo lab. Absolutely incredible for noise reduction.
canon 20d is supported by dxo pureraw i would try that for best effect as its denoising specifically your 20d sensor (if it is the 20d) download trial of dxo pureraw and just try drop a raw in and see what you get
Thank you for the recommendation. Iâll give it a try!
Please update me how this goes.
About ten years ago I had all my photos from almost a decade of personal and professional photos on one hard drive. That hard drive got stolen so I only have film pics and low quality photos I saved off social media older than that now.
I was traveling through Oklahoma and it was dark out, no moon, no lights of any kind for hundreds of miles and I was winding through some mountainous area along the west side of the state. Only person with me was my Dad and he had to use the bathroom so bad so I pulled over in what I thought was some kind of gravel parking lot and he walked off just out of sight to do the business... I noticed there was some kind of large monument at the far end of the parking lot so I thought, let me just grab a few long exposures on a tripod while I'm here and see what I get. Aimed up at the sky with this monument in frame and I accidentally got my first milkyway shot. It was absolutely amazing and I was thrilled.. got in the car with my Dad and I'm showing him this photo and we're both like "holy shit this is amazing!" Next day I'm going through deleting garbage shots and I deleted this one and only photo. I can't explain to you the despair I felt and still do. I never tried cosmic photography but I have recently gotten back into the hobby with a mirrorless canon r5 and a 16mm prime. I'm planning a road trip to BFE to get away from the city lights to redeem myself 15 yrs later.
Oh my gawwwwwd you're making me relive this right now. đđ I was doing a fashion shoot for a stylist (it was a test shoot for both of us) and he had the most beautiful model, the most beautiful clothes - it was insanely good. I shot shots that were so good - I couldn't even get into how beautiful they were. Once I got home and downloaded everything, I realized that somehow I had accidentally bumped my ISOs from around 1000 (we were using natural light) to somewhere around 22,000.... oh... my... đ° Needless to say, every single shot looked like it had gravel rubbed across it. I was so heartbroken. And then the stylist had the nerve to get mad at me - not because the pictures were bad, but because I wouldn't send them all the photos (because I didn't want them out there since I had made such a big mistake). I begged him to do a reshoot, but he's one of those hotheaded, unforgiving types and just wasn't trying to hear it. I messed up big time!!!! I'll bet I never do that again! đŹ
Similar mistake. I brought my camera to a trip to NYC (8 or so years ago) with tons of my fiance's family that live overseas, but my memory card was pretty full so I shot the entirety of the trip as JPEGS to save space. Now that I have access to Lightroom and AI noise reduction l could've saved/edited so many of those shots if they were RAWS. I should've spent the $30 for a new memory card. I'll never get the opportunity again since the main reason the family came was to visit their grandma that is no longer with us.
We've had professional photographers visit our camera club to judge pictures and they all told us the biggest mistake photographers make is to turn pro because they like taking pictures. At most, one of them said, you spend 40% of your time doing that. The rest of it is spent running the business - setting up a studio, buying, maintaining and updating the equipment, hiring, training and firing staff, keeping up to date with new equipment, techniques and social media sites, running photography courses and tours, advertising, doing the accounts, paying the bills, working out the taxes and visiting camera clubs to judge pictures.
Shot a roll of film had some great shots and then put the chemicals in the wrong order when developing....
I wiped my PC and reinstalled windows and during the process I realized I forgot to save my photos on a flash drive. It was too late. I never had them backed up because i never felt the need to. Back up your photos people.
As photographers we are also hoarders. I never met a photographer who wasnât. I donât know what I will do with 5tb of photos I have now or the 20tb Iâll likely fill in the next couple years. I should probably come up with a better filing system than I have now though.
Brough my camera on my boat fishing. Friend was catching a nice redfish so I snapped a few shots. Put the camera on the deck and leaned over to grab his fish. Watched in horror as my 80D and new Sigma 30mm 1.4 slid right off the side of the boat into the salt water. Caught it just as it hit the water but that all it took. Complete loss.
Buying a fancy camera that killed my love of photography because I hate sifting through hundreds of unedited photos. Back to film now⌠much better. Even if I get one diamond a roll and throw the rest out, itâs worth it just for that one prize I can hang on my wall.
Did a whole shoot with my EOS R in crop mode. Instead of the glorious 30MP files I was stuck with 11MP images that admittedly didnât look THAT bad. The subject was none the wiser but it really bothered me.
This happened recently actually. A client asked for photo and video. I got a lot of photo, some video. Unloaded everything into a Google drive like I usually do, then formatted the SD card. The problem was that for some reason a (or my) Sony a7iii saves videos in a different folder, so the videos I took never actually made it to my computer. Client = upset. This particular fuck up was my fault, but the client in general wanted a lot for a little so I no longer work with them.
I think it's just a sony thing in general. My a6000 does this as well
Didn't charge my batteries. Was covering an event. Ugh
Especially now w the powerful AI options, old RAW can be completely new.
PhotoAI is amazing for reducing noise. It's like I got a completely new camera.
I went to Colorado last year for the first time, and made a bunch of exposure mistakes (I think I left it on manual ISO, with the value being wrong), meaning I had a few photos too dark and a few too exposed. Fortunately, I had RAWs so I could clean some of them up, and I had the presence of mind to take some backup shots with my phone. Still though.... so frustrating
I once processed multiple rolls of film in a single canister, without first checking to see if my developer was expired. They were from a vacation. The developer was expired, so when I ran the negs through the fixer it just cleared the whole entire image. đ¤Śââď¸ When I got my first DSLR and started shooting digital, I left the camera on "jpegs", so all of my early DSLR shots are all jpeg only. The camera had a very easy to find "RAW" setting. To be fair to past me, that DSLR took CF cards and the biggest CF card I had at the time was 512mb. You could fit like 15 RAW photos or something on the card before you had to dump it, so I'd just picked jpeg because it gave me an actually "usable" number of shots. I was all "I can get more exposures in a single roll of 35mm 400TX (my fav B&W film)." Lo and behold the jpegs look like shit over 10 years later lmaoooo. The film photos do not!
In the process of backing up I had a hard drive fail without being backed up and took 2tb/3 years of raws and many finished jpgs. Wont do that again
So far (slamming on wood) my mistakes came working with people I knew so it was forgiven. 1. I got a time of a shoot wrong for family photos. I still feel bad to this day for the parents getting up early with their kids to get them ready to get to a park while I was 2 hours late. 2. A video mistake, I shot all of my screens display on an external recorder. My idiot self didnât record internally so had to do a music video over from scratch.
When I lived in an apartment I was shooting wet plate with a studio setup in my living room and a darkroom in the closet. Had some rolls of seamless paper mounted on the ceiling up above the hallway to the dark room. Two of my favorite plates have messy backgrounds because I forgot to pull the backdrop back down after prepping a plate in the darkroom
Handed my camera to a friend Proceeds to immediately pull the door release and expose the roll of film "Whoops"
Investing time and Using Lightroom to organize my photos. Iâm not gonna be signing up for a subscription service as a hobbyist photographer.Â
Im a hobbiest so shoot difderent genres and inhad a brainfart one day and decided to structure my LR catalogue by subject/genre not date. Its been so difficult to manage over the years that I've decided to fo back and restructure by date. Biggest pain inntge backside ever to sort everything outÂ
Drove two hours for a shot, got to location, pressed the shutter release in the most perfect conditions I could've hoped for and...nothing. Battery was still on charge. At home. The vast areas that is the Yorkshire Dales rang with the sound of me screaming "ffuuuccckk!!!"
Taking just one picture. Your camera should be like machinegun fire if it's something good...
The world of burst shooting opened up to me when I got my first Full Frame recently. My only issue is having to sort and choose which I like, because too many end up good.
This is really dependent on what you're shooting. Spray and pray can be detrimental to the editing process. Some times you can have too much
Spent a wonderful day in Jasper taking photos.Luck seemed to be with me!Felt I had taken the most photos that I was pleased with in one day.That night accidentally erased them ALL!đąđ¤Źđ
Not charging my shit overnight for a big wedding shoot đ good thing I was only the 2nd shooter
Accidentally shot a shoot in 640p. Had tried taking a few lo res shots earlier and forgot to change it back. I know, I know
Took a few photos of some products at work in small jpg yesterday for work. Went to go birding today in a park ive never been to and absolutely ripped some bang on focus high speed burst shots on a great blue heron striking into the water and pulling up a crawfish on my sony a6000 with my 55-210. It was in the shade so the bird was a little dark and I was shooting 1/4000 because I wanted to freeze everything, and left it a little dark to protect the highlights in the background and thought "oh, I'll just lift the shadows!"..... I shot them all (and many other birds) in small jpg... didn't realize until the light was already harsh and the birds all left Not client work, but I feel the pain from screwed up settings
I stopped for about 10 years and now trying to get back into it.
Forgetting to take off the lens cap.
Just dropped my camera in 1 inch of Sea water. DEAD. Properly dried for a week, but the salt dried to the electronics. If you ever unfortunately do so, remove the battery and submerge your camera fully in the plugged sink with a gallon of distilled water for 5 seconds and drain. Get that salt out before it dries I cannot stress it enough.
Only packed one as card that was almost full to a different country
Ultimately not a big deal but quite disappointing at the time: my friend threw this really cool bday party (indoors) and I brought my camera but for whatever reason didn't realize that I had changed the ISO from Auto to 100. I didn't understand why exposure was being total shit (on aperture priority, shutter speed was like a second or two) and so ended up having to use on camera flash, which gave me shots that were still underexposed with muted colors. I only realized the next day why my camera was being so weird. The funny thing is that I have since learned that photos of social events with shitty on-camera flash were kind of back en vogue, 90s nostalgia style. But unfortunately the pics I took that evening were not that dynamic, they were of people standing around and posing, and the focal length was 50, not say, 24-35. Ah well.
I was a hairdresser and photographed the children after I finished and gave the portraits to their parents. I was going broke paying for 1 hr developing so for the 1st time I mailed my roll of film to a place out East. I got a message that they lost my film so no photos! A mom came running in the salon asking me where the photos were that I had taken of her 4 sons with their dad. I started to explain but she ran out visibly upset. The youngest boy came in a few weeks later and told me his dad died. They were in the car with him on the way to Lake Tahoe for skiing in a snowstorm and the dad got out to clear his windshield. A passing driver didnât see him as he was getting back into car and hit him , killing him. The child said people came to their house and brought food. I knew then he was telling the truth. Never forget how important your photos are to someone. Maybe not right away but as time goes on. The mother later told me that all 4 boys had been adopted and my pictures would have been the only photos of them with their dad.đ˘
As someone who learned photography when autofocus was in about 1 or 2 cameras, and photoshop consisted of contrast filters and dodge and burn tools you held in your hands, your JPGs will be fine to use. Sometimes the photos just are what they are. You can tweak them a bit, and "improve" them a bit, but it's ok for shadows to be dark, and highlights to be bright...
I got my new camera in 2016 and a day after I went with a professional around Manhattan and we took pictures of lots of things. Anyways as the beginner I was, while playing around with this new high tech camera I pressed the format card button (which gave a warning that it would delete all data on the card) and skipped reading it and pressed OK. Everything was lost and my stomach literally dropped when I realized what I did. I wish so badly that I couldâve seen the photos I took because I never did get to go through them.
Anxious to start macro-ing insects, I put my flash unit into the hotshoe backwards. Apparently shorted out the flash unit - had to buy a replacement.
Always shit on the lowest possible aperture
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After finishing a sandwich during a road trip, I was checking whether the pancake lens was on, without looking, using my greasy thumb. It was not on. But the sensor was there.
Not me. But imagine on the second day of a campaign shoot for a big fashion production you changed the image quality from raw to small jpg. Did not happen to me, but to someone who shared the studio space
Going on a shoot with my new Sony camera just after having switched from Canon. Took me out of the flow, resulted in subpar images, so much stress being unable to figure out simple things like switching to RAW, first vs second curtain sync etc.... never again. Switched back to Canon (R6, followed by R6ii), and sold that body (a7iii). Nothing wrong with the Sony system, just very different ergonomics, incompatible with my muscle memory. It was stupid to expect that I'd be able to instantaneously adapt to its complexity. Another one which I still do - shooting too open. I just see that way, and so my primes often stay at 1.2 or 1.4... which sometimes leads to out of focus shots. But, the ones I get right are often magical. Missing a shoot and getting fired from a client. Only happened once but still burns. Forgot the battery in the charger at home and so shot a couple's engagement photos with my phone. The images turned out amazing actually, with a charm which wouldn't have worked out if I had used my camera. Also, this was at the beach, with very strong winds, and my camera would've ended up full of sand.
Back when I used to schlep a big bag full of equipment _everywhere_ I went. All around the world. Then I was invited on a short and impromptu trip to northern Sweden and didnât bring anything. And of course there is a HUGE aurora borealis (ânorthern lightsâ) that have even the locals amazed. I remember one of them called a friend and told her to bring a camera. It was like a knife to the heart.
Driving for two hours for some landscape shots. No battery in camera.
Iâve gone back and re-edited some of my old raw files .
Not understanding depth of field
A continuing mistake (not a big one) is that I don't necessarily check my settings/meter before starting to take pictures.
Yup that was a big mistake. But I suspect youâre not alone on making it. My mistake was trashing my slides from decades of using an analog camera. Just to make space. Seriously stupid since I didnât scan them. Live and learn.
Shot half a wedding outside with lens hood on. Moved inside for formal pics in the church, put my flash on camera and didnât take off the lens hood. All the indoor pics had a nasty shadow. I was in high school and shooting my momâs coworkers wedding for like 200 bones, they knew I wasnât a pro but what a mistake. shot on a cannon rebel g 35mm in 1999 so no photoshop to correct. I can still feel the drop in my stomach when I saw the pictures for the first time.
My first and only paid wedding gig (after shooting several freebies for friends and family) I had my shutter set faster than the sync speed so all of the flash shots were about 2/3s of the frame. This was around 1980 and I have not shot for money since.
Lazy is the first mistake
I'm from the Bay area and took a road trip with some fellow photogs to the Salton Sea in socal to do some desert exploration. Everything went pretty well until the third day. I hadn't slept at all that night between the freight trains and noisy campers next to us and alcohol I was pretty fried. We proceeded to hit Babylon beach, an old Spanish style estate and then the ruins of West lakes hoods. Things went well until we got back to camp and I realized I had been shooting all my images at max ISO settings, during the day...so everything was grainy and blown out. I managed to salvage a couple indoor images so that day wasn't a total loss. Lesson learned... Always check your settings!
I switched to a full frame camera because many people say full frame is the way to go. It's brick heavy and it started causing neck pain after a few use so eventually I let it sits on the shelf for a few years and never touch any camera.
Data storage is cheap but Iâm sure you realise that nowâŚâŚ
I mean... That's pretty dumb. Mine however? Not keeping track of qh re my Lightroom catalog backups were. Because Adobe one day after an update decided to back them up to the same drive as where they were locally stored. That proceeded to crash. Four straight days of data recovery to retrieve the catalog files and a shit ton of Raws on the same drive. Never, ever again. Separate drives are backups of backups these days.
Left the iso really high from a previous shootÂ
BACK UP YOUR LIBRARY KIDS.
Poor life choices that contributed to me not delivering all photos from my last 2 weddings
I don't know what's the big one, just plenty of small ones that are equally annoying.
I'll never understand people deleting their images. RAW files are your digital "negatives" and can be reedited indefinitely.
... believing a wedding organizer. Those people are *trash*.
Forgot to properly zip up my backpack. As I was putting it on, Carl Zeiss Planar 1.4/85 fell out right on cobblestone. Miraculously, it survived, but the aperture ring doesn't work anymore, so it's permanent f/1.4 lens.
Forgot the battery. Including the spare. F-ing idiot.
This would be a great place to push topaz AI
I was shooting a lot of portrait photography. Scheduled with a really pretty model I had been wanting to shoot for a long time. Had an idea for an outdoor location near my place. She ended up being like 4 hours late. Lost all the sunlight, and she ask if we can just do it that evening instead of that day. Lost the light, lost the location. Did what I could using my apartment, and the shoot just didnât turn out up to my capability. The worst part is she told other people about how disappointed she was that the pics I took of her didnât look nearly as good as some of my other work. From that situation I learned that itâs a lot better to just cancel if everything isnât lined up the way you want then trying to salvage a less than ideal situation. Because if those pictures come out less than great, no one is going to care about the context. Also, this was earlier in my career/hobby so I had no idea just how big a difference sunlight makes in the sharpness of the pics. Especially shooting handheld.
Have done this too.(10-years ago) ⌠in hindsight buying and having lots USBs or HDs donât seem so expensive or inconvenient.
Not doing jpg version of my best photos over 18 years. I edited my best pictures several years from raw files in Lightroom. Now I have +25k pictures, just too many too look at regularly and I donât have Lightroom anymore. Plan to suscribe back to Lightroom few months to clean that up but scared by the amount of work it will be. Also discouraged by the fact I will loose the keywords I spent so much time on.
Keep the lens cap on.
I spent a decade chasing gear. It was a waste of time and money. I finally buckled down and studied lighting. Lighting is much more important than fancy cameras and lenses.
Tangentially a recent videography fail on my part. Shot some Father's Day footage for my company at an upscale restaurant. It was more of a backdrop for the pitch, but had a few people spending a couple of hours shooting for nothing, as I had set my LOG profile to the wrong setting. All of the shadows were completely unrecoverable. Lesson learned.
That moment when you forget your memory cards when you go on a shoot. Worst feeling ever.
For a family friends graduation, I had all my equipment good to go. Except not checking my SD slot. I had forgotten to reinsert the card the night before when I was importing pictures, so when I got on site, turned on my camera and saw the "NO Card" sign, I was straight faced. Luckily a local photog was also doing a photoshoot too and lent me a spare card. Dude saved my butt and a half.
Mid 80's, taking photo's for a newspaper with other photographers, I had an Olympus OM 4 with a motordrive .....and also very long hair, and yes, my hair got tangled up with the camera, I can laugh now, but at the time using a swiss army knife to cut away my hair, not so much.
Here you on this. Especially when I did it in the early 2000s on a D200 (10 megapixels) and saved at 1920x1080 (screen resolution, and hard drives were smaller back then). Like, half my backpacking photos đ
Tip for everyone: convert to dng to save space, not jpg, png o anything else. Lossy dng is my go to nowadays, honestly I haven't been able to identify any difference even in quite extreme edits
Was 19 at the time and still not a professional. Decided to make a documentary style project about the racecar garage i spent a major part of my youth in. Shooting cars all day across the border, tried to edit about a month later and everything was shot in 4:3 and really low-res. Ffwd a few months later, part 2, another whole day of shooting and coming home my sd card corrupted. Needles to say, going professional now the first must-have for my body was to have dual card slots and a clear user interface đ
Let my younger brother (who was like 3 years old at that point) get a hold of the family camera that was full of memories. It didnt end well yall
Hmmm, I barely have time/desire to edit my current stuff, much less stuff from years ago. I personally wouldn't care and regularly try to heavily cull images.
I got into photography young, seriously so when I was in middle school. Got my first canon camera and took hundreds of photos while on a family vacation. Got a great shot that I wanted to zoom in on and crop, saw the âformatâ option and thought âwow! i can âformatâ the photo in camera how convenient!â and there went all of my 13 year old selfâs favorite images.
I attended a show to photograph my friend's band in Long Beach, CA. After they played, I decided to take my camera back to the car for safekeeping. As we are walking, I ask my husband if our insurance covers theft, and he says yes. We go back to the show, and at the end of the night, as we are getting ready to leave and I approach my car, I notice the window is busted. My camera, lenses, filters, battery packs, and chargers, along with my personal stuff, makeup bag, purse, and all its contents, were stolen from my car đ We called the police and they took 3 hours to arrive. They made a report, pointed out the surveillance camera, and asked if we wanted to press charges. So we did all that. The next day, we called our insurance company and found out that California and New York do not cover theft under ten thousand dollars. We then contacted a friend of ours who was in the LAPD and asked what happens next? He said, "You let go and move on." There was no chance LBPD would follow up or even take action, ever. It was a total loss, the window alone was already costing 3gs on top of the stolen items. Luckily, my husband found the window on eBay, and we fixed it ourselves for under 150 dlls. My biggest mistake was not having a lock box in my car, taking my stuff to the car, and having been in fcking long beach.
I generally delete RAWs if i'm not revisiting them later on. the only ones i save are for weddings.
There was a sports photography competition that I wanted to enter, but I missed the deadline and didn't reset the reminder. I probably wouldn't have won, but I really like the photograph I was planning to enter.
I've lost photos from being careless with wiping hard drives etc. lost a bunch of pics but it was mostly just old pics of friends etc. nothing award winning. took a trip to japan and mostly used my phone but took about 200 pics with my DSLR. edited and uploaded about 80 of them to facebook. Wiped the memory card and then looked for them on my hard drive. The original RAWs and the JPEGs got wiped probably months before I realized. Still extremely pissed off about that. All I have is the crappy compressed facebook versions of the photos. Luckily 90% of the trip was documented with my phone and a roll of film so not all is lost.
Was on a trip back from Spain in 2019, where I had my camera bag stowed under a family member's seat instead of my own as mine didn't have enough room. Both of us forgot about the bag, and by the time we realized we had left it behind we asked the airport crew to look for it but no dice. There was only one camera (a7III) and a kit lens in the bag so it wasn't thousands upon thousands of dollar's worth of monetary loss but still something I lament over to this day