The aim is to avoid “…I should have…” or “I wish I had…” moments.

1. Dark Faces

This happens when the light source eg. the sun is behind your subject. This kind of mistake happens all the time even to someone who has taken a lot of photographs (less frequent though).

Example:

One way to fix this is by using a flash or a reflector or set the camera to centre weight metering.

The rule of thumb: “If the shadow leans towards you, use your flash or a reflector or set to centre-weight metering”

2. Missing Feet

So you’re on a trip and pretty excited with the things surrounds you. You take a snap of your trip group and by the time you came home you noticed something isn’t right… Their feet were cropped out!!

Example:

Maybe not everyone noticed this, but having the feet cropped out is a very common annoying mistake and many times a photo that should be great in the living room is lost.

3. Slanted Horizon

Sunset on the sea (or a storm cloud in this example) is always a great view to snap. However we have to take care that we don’t tilt our camera a tad bit. The horizon is very sensitive to angle and can be very annoying when slanted. Look at the picture below:

Slanted horizon gives an unsteady feeling, to address this, turn on your guide lines in the camera viewfinder.

4. Forgotten Manual Focus

The title speaks for itself. There was one time when I got a batch of blurred image because I had forgotten to turn my auto focus back on. The LCD preview will not do any justice since most image looks clear in there, however once viewed on your computer screen, great disappointment awaits.

5. Lazy to Take Another Shot

If you feel your shot is not up to scratch, shoot again. Trust me, there are many things that photoshop cannot fix; and you only know this after you got home!

That’s a starter list, there are many more common mistakes that we do, however above are the ones I felt most frequently happen.