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20 Things Most PHOTOGRAPHERS Get WRONG



INDEX BELOW:

#1: 0:52 – Your lens’ SWEET SPOT probably isn’t f/8
#2: 1:43 – FOCUS BREATHING might make your lens short
#3: 6:37 – The RECIPROCAL RULE isn’t a rule at all
#4: 10:58 – Buying a camera without checking the lenses
#5: 12:23 – Using INFINITY FOCUS to get everything in focus
#6: 13:22 – DEPTH-OF-FIELD isn’t real at all
#7: 14:25 – 4K is great even if your screen isn’t
#8: 16:00 – Printing at 300 DPI doesn’t mean perfect sharpness
#9: 16:45 – F/STOPs don’t tell you the exposure, T-STOPS do
#10: 18:12 – FULL FRAME LENSES on CROP BODIES are less sharp
#11: 20:39 – FILTERS aren’t worth it for many photographers
#12: 21:37 – Many REVIEWS aren’t TRUSTWORTHY
#13: 27:04 – Cropping a sharper, short lens beats longer lenses
#14: 29:22 – Apply the CROP FACTOR to focal length & f/stop
#15: 32:38 – HIGH MEGAPIXELS doesn’t mean HIGH NOISE
#16: 34:00 – Noise at base ISO is important
#17: 35:25 – ISO is not an acronym, and is “eye-so”, not I-S-O
#18: 36:11 – AUTOFOCUS is more accurate than MANUAL FOCUS
#19: 38:23 – AUTOEXPOSURE is better than LIGHT METERS
#20: 41:07 – ART is more important than TECHNOLOGY

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STARTER CAMERAS:
Basic Starter Camera ($280 used): Canon T3 http://sdp.io/t3
Better Starter Camera ($500): Nikon D5300 http://sdp.io/d5300
Better Travel Camera ($500): Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark II http://sdp.io/em10ii

LANDSCAPE CAMERAS:
Good ($550): Sony a6000 http://sdp.io/a6000
Better ($1,400): Nikon D5500 http://sdp.io/D5500 & Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8 http://sdp.io/s35
Best ($3,150): Pentax K-1 http://sdp.io/K1 & Pentax 24-70 f/2.8 http://sdp.io/p24

PORTRAIT CAMERAS:
Beginner ($950): Canon T6i http://sdp.io/t6i & Canon 50mm f/1.8 http://sdp.io/c50
Better ($3,000): Nikon D610 http://sdp.io/d610 & Tamron 70-200 f/2.8 http://sdp.io/t200
Best ($5,300): Nikon D810 http://sdp.io/d810 & Nikon 70-200 f/2.8E http://sdp.io/n200e

WILDLIFE CAMERAS:
Starter ($1,100): Canon 7D http://sdp.io/7D & Canon 400mm f/5.6 http://sdp.io/c400
Great ($3,200): Nikon D500 http://sdp.io/d500 & Nikon 200-500 f/5.6 http://sdp.io/n500

VIDEO CAMERAS:
Beginner ($500): Panasonic G7 http://sdp.io/g7 & Panasonic 14-42mm http://sdp.io/p42
Better ($1,400): Panasonic GH4 http://amzn.to/2p5dAmD & Panasonic 14-140 f/3.5-5.6 http://sdp.io/p140
Best ($4,300): Panasonic GH5 http://sdp.io/gh5 & Metabones Speed Booster XL http://sdp.io/mbxl & Sigma 18-35 f/1.8 http://sdp.io/s35 & Sigma 50-100 f/1.8 http://sdp.io/s100

DRONES:
Beginner ($400): DJI Phantom 3 http://sdp.io/p3
Travel ($1,000): DJI Mavic Pro http://sdp.io/Mavic
Better Image Quality ($1,500): DJI Phantom 4 Pro http://sdp.io/p4p

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48 responses to “20 Things Most PHOTOGRAPHERS Get WRONG”

  5. Hello Tony, I am from India.Ur videos are awesome.Superb guidance tools!!

    I have a question.
     I am a budget customer.I have around a year of experience with dslr mostly doing portraits and closeup oil painting photos,also some home videos.Now I will be buying a used one.
    I am confused between two budget choices available to me.
    1.Canon 600d plus 18 55 kit lens
    2.Nikon 5200 with 18 55 kit lens.
    These two are available to me at almost same price,with the Canon available 50 dollar cheaper.

     I am skeptical about Nikon's kit lens capability since I believe Canon kit lens will give me a significant better quality and Canon gives live view aperture change option.I need ur opinion on this.
    However I think 5200d will have a better camera processor and 24 MP quality than Canon one because Canon's 600d is older(I guess).
    Kindly help me evaluate these two.Thanks alot.

  6. thanks Tony and chalsea for these amazing tutorials…May i ask for your advice? i am a beginner in this field with an aptitude for landscape and family photography. I intend to purchase Nikon D5300 with an 18-55mm f3.5- 5.6g kit lens. What other lens do u suggest..a 35mm f1.8g prime or a 70-300mm f4.5-6.3 zoom ?

  8. All true. Have faced number 20 recently. A few friends and I go out every week or so photographing various things. I asked one friend if she wanted to come out one week. She's a brilliant photographer who uses her phone, but honestly, such good results. She said she wasn't sure if she was a very good photographer because she doesn't have as good a camera as us. Having a good camera is great, and sure if she were to think about going pro, it might be an idea. But having a great camera but no "eye" is useless.

  11. Awesome! particularly mention of "investor syndrome" skewing perception! And Infinity misconception ( tho cuz my eyes suk I habitually hit infinity then "nudge back an unscientific smidegeon" rather than futz around with focus zoom… particularly when not shooting locked down )

    Sure this was mentioned to tony…
    But on #12
    You can spew off all u want and not suffer "libel or slander" as long as much is yer opinion ( wrong or not ).
    Freedom of speech is meaningless if you are only free to say things that are not disagreeable to someone.

    One has to "knowingly" say something they are aware is false ( knowingly lie ).
    Otherwise an opinion being "a belief in something for no good reason" would basically be illegal by possibly up to half our population on any issue they spout off about.
    With a good lawyer and deep pockets? All bets r off. 🙁
    And anyone can be sued given the motivation. ( after all it's simply a made up abstraction in the end? )

  13. At least Tony ACTUALLY makes a living as a working photographer….versus FroBLOWS or Ken (doesn't) Rockwell, master of the palm frond shot.

    Fro is just a broadcast venue; when your only genre' is rock and roll/music, YOU STARVE. Rockwell pioneered clicks for bigtime affiliate pay.

    To each their own, but for me…..give me a WORKING shooter, not wanna-be's who's only client is….themselves.

  14. My 24-70 EF lens looks like crap on my C 100. The cheap 18-135 is an awesome lens. And performs quite well in low light. Also the new plastic 70-300 is excellent. I would prefer it on my C100 than either of my two 70-200's or the 100-400. Canon plastic APS-C lenses are superb. I have most of the EF lenses and will be selling a few. Don't be fooled!

  17. 'Focusbreathing' – "People either don't know about focusbreathing or they have a misunderstanding about how it works" – you know, sometimes Tony sounds super arrogant. He's basically saying, only he understands this. Maybe the sentence should end with, 'or maybe you do know about focusbreathing, or godforbid, have a better understanding of it than I do'

  20. 'Tony…'Focus Breathing'…you're using it wrong! Stop, already! You should be saying 'maximum magnification/reproduction.' The Canon lens has a reproduction value of .2x and the Nikon lens has a value of .12x. This is because the Canon lens allows you to get more than 6" closer to your subject. This is NOT focus breathing. Focus breathing is when an object (noticeably) changes size as it comes into and goes out of focus. It is an 'attribute' of lens design, not a cause of the discrepancy between the two lenses. You have the power and ability to correct this misconception and properly educate people. Please do.

  21. I disagree with the lens thing. I had a Canon EF-S 18-135mm and bought a Sigma 17-55 f 2.8 and a Tamrom 70-200 f2.8 for portrait and the different on picture quality is way ahead. Better everything .So Full frame lens do work perfect with Crop Sensor cameras. I have a Canon 70D by the way.

  25. So I just watched your tutorial on the Fujifilm XT 10, as I'm waiting for it in the mail. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I'm switching from a Canon, I've always used cannons, and I'm trying to mirror less especially for travel. So your tips and information are priceless and very well expressed.

  26. You started #17 it correctly by saying "this is a small thing". LoL

    #19 applies more to available light shooting. Light meters are for added lights (multiple off-camera strobes, etc.)

  30. I am surprised at the comment made about "sweet spot" at 0:1:38 I never thought that lenses were at their very sharpest wide open, but according to the comment, my Canon 24-105 and my Canon 600mm f4 are, indeed, sharper wide open than they are at any other aperture. I have not necessarily found this to be the case; perhaps I need to do some formal testing in order to either verify or nullify Tony's claim.

  32. @44:00 [When used on an APS-C camera,] "…any flaws in the [full-frame] lens are magnified by more than 200%". This misleading claim is just as true of cropped-sensor lenses as it is of full-frame lenses. It is simply due to the fact that cropped-sensor cameras must magnify all images to match the field of view of a full-frame camera. Northrup then uses this slight-of-hand to justify his blatantly deceptive claim that "you can put a full-frame professional lens on your camera and get less sharp results than you might with your $50 or $100 kit lens". Of course you can, if you don't know what you're doing, particularly if you swallow Northrup's hype as gospel.

    It doesn't matter how many "equivalence" conversions you may concoct to obscure objective physical measurements, cropping an image has no effect on its quality or sharpness. Applying sensor crop factor to aperture is useful only when comparing DOF between cropped-sensor and full-frame cameras. Otherwise f2.8 is f2.8, just as a 50mm lens is always a 50mm lens, regardless of which type of camera you use. And no, it is not "commonly accepted" to apply crop factor to a lens' f-stop, because it is not an inherent property of the lens and provides no guidance in selecting proper exposure.

  33. I clicked on this not expecting much. I then saw the length of the video and immediately started skipping through it… but then found myself heading back to the beginning, watching all 44 minutes of this video. Honestly, there was so much valuable information in this video it's insane. Thanks for this! 🙂

  34. So, Tony, I just watched your entire video and I'm always amazed at how thoroughly you have thought out all these details–while never losing sight of the preeminence of the artistic content. But I have a technical question I hope you can clarify for me.

    I shoot video, and often like to use Canon FD lenses on MFT and APS-C sensor cameras—with a speed booster.

    With the advent of internally stabilized cams, like the G85, GH5, and the A6500 it makes it possible to use dumb lenses with the internal stabilization.

    My question is what do you tell the camera when it asks what lens you are using.
    For instance, you have a 100 mm lens mounted on a speed booster and you're shooting with a APS-C camera. The camera asks "what lens are you shooting with?" What do you tell it if you're shooting with a
    1. standard FD to E mount adapter?
    2. a speed booster to E mount adapter?—with the goal being getting the best result for stabilization.
    The seller of my particular FD to E mount speed booster says this:
    "In common lens adapters, cropping effect occurs in all APS-C digital cameras with 1.5x magnification. This adapter reduces focal length to 0.72x , to adjust the image size to near 1:1 so that the focal length of the image is close to actual focal length of the lens, e.g. 50mm x 1.5 x 0.72 = 54mm."
    If I don't factor in the APS-C crop the answer for a 50mm lens would be about 35mm (50mm X 0.72). But, if I do factor in the crop I get the 54mm the seller mentions.
    I'm confused as to what to tell the cam.
    Can you help clarify this for me?

  41. Hi Tony. Thanks for the video. It seems that you chose not to switch to Nikon at the time because of one lense's focus breathing when there are sooooooo many other amazing Nikkor lenses to choose from for portraiture which I assume you were wanting to use it for as wildlife and sports are less of an issue with focus breathing. This doesn't seem logical to me and your extensive knowledge of photography thus surprised me when I watched the video. Thank you

  45. Really related well to the point about high megapixel sensors. I shoot with a Nikon D7200 which has a very high density sensor (if it was full frame it would have somewhere around 50mp) and I've had to shoot at faster speeds to get the same rate of keepers, but I've also improved my handholding technique so on less dense sensors (such as the D750) I get more keepers than I used to.

    Interesting about FF lenses on crop cameras, too. I get excellent results from full frame primes on the DX sensor, but zooms really don't hold up at higher pixel densities. I wonder if that means they're not sharp enough for 50mp+ full frame sensors, or whether they'll need updating in the future.

  46. Enjoyed the tutorial and hearing your opinions Tony.  Some good stuff.  However, I don't share your assessment "auto-focus all the way for me" when discussing lenses for digital cameras. Certainly focus-peaking is flawed when using manual focus glass, but focus magnification is a great tool to insure you're hitting the targeted focus area, whether using manual or auto-focus lenses.  This is especially true for macro, product, and occasionally portrait photography.  Yes, for sports, wildlife or other projects where focus tracking is needed, auto focus lenses are likely the best choice, but manual focus lenses still play a significant role in photography and I was a bit surprised with your sweeping statement dismissing them.

  47. Regarding the #3 Reciprocal rule: I own nikkor 180mm f/2.8 lens, which I use on a crop sensor body D7200, shooting at night at ISO3200 and at 1/125 shutter speed and got clear photos, so it's more about hand-holding technic and breathing while shooting. And it's lot more easier with nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens shooting at 1/15 and have a clear photos without any VR.

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