Beginner Tips, Mistakes and Projects

A starter kit for anyone picking up a camera seriously. It gathers the mistakes most beginners make and how to avoid them, the advice worth ignoring, and small habits such as setting the viewfinder diopter correctly. Composition lessons teach how to see a picture before taking it, and a run of at-home projects, from easy macro to a first timelapse, gives the ideas something to practise on.

17 Mar 2021

Easy Macro Photography

Andrew Boey shoots close-ups of potted plants during lockdown with a tripod, stool, LED light and close-up filters on a 50mm lens. He angles black card away from the light for solid blacks, drops ISO to 400, picks f/8 for depth and underexposes a stop for a low-key look.

6 Sep 2021

Top Bad Advice from Photographers

Andrew Boey picks apart common photography advice: that one or two expensive lenses cover every genre, when different genres need different glass like shoes for different jobs; that only primes are worth using, when zooms save time on rushed shoots; that upgrading is unnecessary; and never collecting booking deposits.

29 Oct 2021

Stop Making These Mistakes, Photographers

Andrew Boey, drawing on twenty years of teaching, lists mistakes photographers repeat: shooting to impress other photographers rather than the paying subject, fretting over EXIF data, defaulting to high ISO, and firing burst mode to look like a sports shooter when it only suits fast action or stability bracketing.