Seven Photography Habits That Are Quietly Ruining Your Shots

Putting your lens cap back on after every shot is costing you photos. It sounds like a minor habit, but when a moment happens in front of you and your hands are fumbling with gear, it's gone.

Coming to you from Jason Vong, this practical video breaks down seven habits that quietly hold back your photography. Vong opens with a side-by-side demonstration that makes the lens cap point impossible to argue with: one person gets the shot, the other is still wrestling with their hood. From there, he moves into something more substantive: the difference between walking away from an event with one decent photo versus a cohesive set that tells a story. Using a day at a horse racing event near Mount Fuji as a working example, Vong shows how a beginning, middle, and end structure turns a random collection of images into something shareable, and how the chronological order of shooting has nothing to do with the order you present the photos.

The focus section is where a lot of people will recognize themselves. Vong describes a recurring problem: you get the shot, you review it later on a larger screen, and the camera locked onto a telephone wire instead of your actual subject. Wide-area autofocus is the culprit. By default, most cameras scan the whole frame and grab whatever is nearest and most prominent. His fix is straightforward: shrink the focus point, place it on your subject manually, and zoom in during playback before you move on. He also addresses the opposite end of the obsessive-gear spectrum: people who toss their camera bodies and lenses around loose in a bag with exposed elements, then wonder why their images are full of dust and specks. A microfiber cloth and a proper sensor cleaning kit used regularly will save you significant time in post.

Two of the habits Vong covers are essentially opposite problems that end up in the same place. The first is shooting everything wide open. He recalls buying his first f/1.4 lens and using it almost exclusively, only to look back at vacation photos where the background is so obliterated it's impossible to tell where the photo was taken. Stopping down to f/4, f/5.6, or f/8 when the location is part of the story puts context back into the image. The second is the experienced shooter who almost never picks up a camera anymore because the conditions are never quite right. Waiting for perfect light, ideal weather, or the right season becomes a habit that quietly stops you from shooting at all. The video makes the case that going out in bad conditions still builds skill, and sometimes produces a better story than a clean, ideal-weather shoot would have.

Vong also makes a sharp point about raw files specifically. Shooting raw only and sitting on thousands of unedited files is one of the fastest ways to kill your motivation. Shooting raw plus JPEG simultaneously gives you files you can post immediately while keeping the raw originals for the handful of images that actually warrant a full edit. Vong says he edits roughly six to seven raw files per session and considers those his portfolio pieces. The rest get handled at the JPEG level with light adjustments to exposure, contrast, and saturation. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Vong.