How to Stop Overshooting Without Missing the Moment

Bad habits don’t always ruin your photos in the moment. They ruin your time, your storage, and your willingness to pick up the camera tomorrow. If you shoot regularly, these patterns creep in fast, and plenty of photographers don’t notice until the backlog feels unmanageable.

Coming to you from Sean Dalton, this practical video uses a trip in Gran Canaria to call out the kind of mistakes that feel harmless on location. Dalton starts with overshooting, and he ties it to a specific culprit: the speed of the Sony a1 II. You know the routine: a scene looks steady, nothing is changing, and you still rattle off 30 frames because it’s easy. Dalton draws a clean line between situations where volume is justified and the ones where you are just creating busywork. He also points out the hidden cost you feel later, when you are staring at thousands of nearly identical files instead of a short set of real options.

He follows that with a confession that hits close to home if travel shoots tend to turn into gear hauls. Dalton shows up with multiple bodies, comparing a Sony a1 II against a Fujifilm camera, plus extra lenses like a 70-200mm lens. The point is not minimalism for its own sake, it’s attention. When your brain is cycling through body choice, lens choice, stills versus video, and “maybe I should swap setups,” you miss moments that were right in front of you. He also talks about the physical drag of carrying it all, especially when the location involves long climbs and constant repositioning. If you’ve ever reached a viewpoint already tired, you know how that changes what you’re willing to try.

The part that lands hardest is the habit that sounds noble but quietly shrinks your output: only shooting when you feel inspired. Dalton argues for action first, and he frames it as a cycle you can restart any day, even on a messy location where the landscape doesn’t hand you clean compositions. He’s out there with James Popsys, and you can see the value of another set of eyes when a place feels “hard to shoot” and you start defaulting to the obvious frames. 

Dalton closes by moving from capture to the part you keep postponing: making same-day selects. Instead of letting thousands of files pile up until editing feels like punishment, he talks through a simple nightly pass while the scenes are still fresh in your head, then a quick baseline edit with Lightroom presets. It’s less about perfect edits and more about tagging what’s worth revisiting while you still remember why you stopped, why you waited, and what almost worked. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Dalton.