Starting Photography in 2026? Avoid These 5 Common Mistakes

 If you're starting photography in 2026, the path to improvement isn't paved with better gear. Brenda Bergreen has spent years shooting weddings, adventure, landscapes, portraits, and travel, and she's mapped out exactly where beginners waste time and where they actually grow.

Coming to you from The Bergreens, this candid video walks through the five things Bergreen would focus on if she were starting over. The first is having a clear vision for why you're shooting. For Bergreen and her husband Marc, that clarity came through developing a defined creative identity around their wedding work, which directly shaped the clients they attracted and the images they made. It sounds simple, but most beginners skip this entirely and end up shooting everything without a real sense of direction. Even if photography is purely a hobby, knowing what you're photographing for makes every decision easier.

The second focus is studying light instead of chasing gear. Bergreen is direct about this: she showed up to beautiful locations early in her career and just started shooting, completely unaware of how the quality and direction of light were shaping her results. Once it clicked, she couldn't stop noticing light everywhere, not just while working. 

The third principle is simplification. Bergreen makes a strong case for going deep on one thing rather than spreading attention across every genre, technique, and focal length at once. She uses a sharp example from their early wedding work: they practiced rapid lens swaps during ceremonies after learning it at a conference, assuming it was the professional move. It wasn't. It was stressful, risky, and unnecessary. That realization pointed to something bigger about how photography improves, not through adding more, but through removing what gets in the way of seeing clearly. The fourth focus, learning why photographs work by analyzing images you're drawn to, is where Bergreen gets into real visual thinking. She walks through one of her favorite photos of Marc on a mountain summit and breaks down exactly why it pulls the eye and creates a sense of scale and movement. It's a practical framework you can apply to any image, your own or someone else's.

The fifth principle might be the most underrated one, and it's worth watching the video to hear Bergreen explain the shift that happened the first time she printed one of her photos large and put it on a wall. Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Bergreen.