[orangezorki]

I have learned to shrug these momentary lapses of reason off and go on shooting. You name it, I've done it: no battery, no memory card, no lens (yes, actually NO lens!!!), wrong ISO, wrong timezone messing up my GPS data in the EXIF....everything, literally everything. You'd think I would have learned by now...nope.

Wait a sec... No battery, no lens - how on earth does that happen?!?!?

EDIT: I'm also really interested where your camera thought you were with the messed up GPS coordinates. Journey to the centre of the earth?

[abieleck]

I find that most of my mistakes come from trying to rush, instead of taking my time and analyzing the scene and my settings. With digital it's easy to go out for a shoot camera a-blazin, checking the LCD for two seconds every dozen shots or so. and not paying attention to the details.

I mainly try and shoot in Manual mode. Not only does help me to slow down a bit, but it also lends to understanding the camera....and photography in general more. Shutter/Aperture priority and all the other modes are great for certain situations, but if it draws your attention away from other elements of a good photograph....well then it becomes more of a hindrance.

Take the time to study your histogram and LCD review, zooming in to make sure you have the settings/sharpness you are looking for. Good luck!

[emalvick]

I'm new to digital (and auto exposure as well, coming from an all manual film camera) So, for example, if I'm stalking wildlife with my 55-300 and I want to lock my shutter at 1/400 (I like how this speed gives a little movement to flapping bird's wings), then I should use Tav mode instead of Tv? (Tv is shutter priority, not Sv, sensitive or ISO priority as stated above). I understand all the modes from the manual (I think), and am making test shots with my new K-5, it's just putting it to use is a little confusing. I guess it is an advantage to be able to have a range of ISO when shooting with a dslr, so you could "lock" your ideal apeture & shutter for those quick wildlife shots.

Previous post stated what Tav and Tv mode are...

What you use is a matter of what you want out of your photos. Tv is nice if you are most concerned with shutter speed, and you are not too concerned with aperture. For instance, you may be most concerned about capturing a moment in sports, animal movement, etc. Tv is also great if your second priority is ISO; you can fix the ISO in Tv mode. The aperture is determined by the camera. Tav is nice when you want control of both the speed and aperture and you are less concerned with ISO. The K5 is the first camera I've owned where this option is viable. Setting aperture is nice for controlling the depth of field. That will depend on what you like out of your images. In your example either Tv or Tav would work. You just have to determine how important an aperture is to you besides the shutter speed.

[ElKay23]

Previous post stated what Tav and Tv mode are...

What you use is a matter of what you want out of your photos. Tv is nice if you are most concerned with shutter speed, and you are not too concerned with aperture. For instance, you may be most concerned about capturing a moment in sports, animal movement, etc. Tv is also great if your second priority is ISO; you can fix the ISO in Tv mode. The aperture is determined by the camera. Tav is nice when you want control of both the speed and aperture and you are less concerned with ISO. The K5 is the first camera I've owned where this option is viable. Setting aperture is nice for controlling the depth of field. That will depend on what you like out of your images. In your example either Tv or Tav would work. You just have to determine how important an aperture is to you besides the shutter speed.

Yes, aperture is important for the depth of field I want. For birds especially, I like the trees & leaves behind subject to blur out, leaving only blotches of color (mostly green). Sounds like I will experiment with TAv, practicing with birds in the backyard. Thanks!

[creampuff]

A simple check of the shots taken by pressing the playback button from time to time would help avoid major exposure or compositional errors by the user.
DSLRs allow us to review our images and provide instant feedback, so if the photographer chooses not to or forgets to use this feature, then who is to blame for less than perfect shots?

[savoche]

A simple check of the shots taken by pressing the playback button from time to time would help avoid major exposure or compositional errors by the user.
DSLRs allow us to review our images and provide instant feedback, so if the photographer chooses not to or forgets to use this feature, then who is to blame for less than perfect shots?

Yes, indeed! But to check if exposures are correct, use the histogram. The LCD might fool you if you just look at the pictures; the histogram never lies.

And now it just remains for me to do as I preach - I tend to trust my camera too much

[ripit]

This is along a little bit different lines but still involves a dose of stupidity. I bought my ist-ds 3 years ago (maybe getting closer to 4) new old stock in the kit. I was organizing my camera gear a bit and saw the kit lens hood picture on the kit box. I thought to myself, I wish I had that hood. I then looked in the box and there it was where it had been sitting for almost 4 years, still wrapped in plastic. I guess I got a free lens hood out of my stupidity (it seems like free as it was paid for years ago).

[Indria Djamil]

I guess this thread have become the collection of stories related to our stupidity with our camera, yes? I also have one:

In one of my photo-shoot about 2 years ago, I am using s piece of napkin to cover my camera flash (I still have my KX at the time, now I sold the KX and move to K5) after a dozen of shots I started to smell something burning, but (stupidly) decided to continue.

At the end of my shoot, I just realized that I have burned the napkin covering my camera flash and also stain the flash strobe glass (it made of plastic and it have melted a bit with piece of burned napkin stuck onto it).

Lucky I can get it repaired and PENTAX replace it with no additional cost. A happy ending nonetheless.

[aleonx3]

This is along a little bit different lines but still involves a dose of stupidity. I bought my ist-ds 3 years ago (maybe getting closer to 4) new old stock in the kit. I was organizing my camera gear a bit and saw the kit lens hood picture on the kit box. I thought to myself, I wish I had that hood. I then looked in the box and there it was where it had been sitting for almost 4 years, still wrapped in plastic. I guess I got a free lens hood out of my stupidity (it seems like free as it was paid for years ago).

@Ripit, your post really make my day.... thanks!! ; although I also had a few embarrassing times when I brought along my camera gear (with a couple of lenses and flash) except to find out that I left the SD card still inserted to the computer at home.

[emalvick]

Yes, aperture is important for the depth of field I want. For birds especially, I like the trees & leaves behind subject to blur out, leaving only blotches of color (mostly green). Sounds like I will experiment with TAv, practicing with birds in the backyard. Thanks!

On the other hand, if I am at a spot where I want TAv, I usually go full manual and play with the ISO and watch the meter in the camera myself. I doubt that's really better, but it allows me to think about the ISO I'm using and lets me make adjustments based on the shot I'm going for. I also think my workflow of going to M mode is due to habit. The K10d didn't do well with high ISO, so I needed M mode to control all three as the shot required. I know the ISO performance on the K5 is way better from my experience, so far, but I still love manual mode.

[RioRico]

My dumbest and most consequential mistake occurred decades ago when I used the wrong flash sync mode. I think I had the camera set to B-sync instead of X-sync for my strobe, so all the Kodacolor negs were half-exposed. Unfortunately, the shoot was a wedding. Unfortunately, the wedding was my boss's daughter's. Unfortunately, my boss was a US Army Command Sergeant Major. Unfortunately, I spent the rest of my enlistment scrubbing jeeps in the motor pool. Fortunately, I was not requested to re-enlist. Moral of the story: Details matter.

[bigdavephoto]

My dumbest and most consequential mistake occurred decades ago when I used the wrong flash sync mode. I think I had the camera set to B-sync instead of X-sync for my strobe, so all the Kodacolor negs were half-exposed. Unfortunately, the shoot was a wedding. Unfortunately, the wedding was my boss's daughter's. Unfortunately, my boss was a US Army Command Sergeant Major. Unfortunately, I spent the rest of my enlistment scrubbing jeeps in the motor pool. Fortunately, I was not requested to re-enlist. Moral of the story: Details matter.

LOL

I think my biggest mistake was the night I got lucky (not that way) and security let me take my *st DL and 28-200 into a concert. Good thing I was sitting front row. Bad thing, I didn't think about the lighting. 101 pictures later, I got 4 or 5 really good pictures 7 or 8 ok pictures and the rest were just blurry messes. Learned my lesson, always check ISO depending on where and what you are taking pictures of.

[MSL]

Awhile back we had a thread on something like WHAT WERE THE MOST IMPORTANT DEVELOPMENTS IN PHOTOGRAPHY? and I put CHIMPING at or near the top of my list. The ability to immediately review+adjust is just transformative. Instead of waiting minutes (for studio toggers using Polaroid previews) to hours to days or longer (for the rest of us), we can find and correct our f*ckups in real-time. That's really big. We learn faster. Maybe we learn better. Feedback loops helps us run smoother, like anti-knock gas.

Thank you for defining chimping. I'd seen the term a few times in different messages and didn't know what it meant.

Also, I skip the "tell me your focal length" screen without looking at it, then my SR settings are screwed and my EXIF info is wrong. Doh.

Not only that, but you can make the shake reduction pretty ineffective. Done this one a few times too!

Somewhere in this forum you can find a thread I started about changing the white balance to a batch of photos - nothing like having it set for indoor daylight style fluorescent lights and then go shoot outdoors to give everything a nice bluish tinge. Then the post-processing program kept not wanting to deal with a couple of images in the batch, so I thought it wasn't working at all. Too many hours spent trying to fix this one.

Other fun problems - switching between non-flash in TAv mode to popping up the flash, only to have it give really wrong settings. Or forgetting what mode I'm in altogether. Most of my problems would disappear if I just slowed down, but I don't get enough time to go shooting during the day, and often have kids in tow, so I'm learning to accept my mistakes.

[ripit]

Hows this for one. I wan't to take some pictures of the thunderbirds for the kids as I have to work, and they are too young to be on a crowded air force base with one parent. I don't figure I'm a good enough photographer to do it manually that fast so I set it in p and ignore the settings. I put it in continuous mode and shot like crazy (I'm bound to get a few keepers). I only have a few minutes on my break (they were flying right over my work and it turned out to be an excellent location). After the fact, I realize I bumped the lens out of A and it was set at f22. The slow shutter speeds caused motion blur in every single shot.
The next day I had much better luck with manual exposure and auto focus. Of course being at a different location, I got lots of shots of the bottom of the jets. At least the kids got to see them live and close up (near the landing strip so some passes were only a couple of hundred feet up, and VERY LOUD).

@RioRico, my few attempts at film photography ended in miserable failure (thats what I get for trying to learn it on my own). Were it not for the instant feedback of digital, and the ability to adjust, correct and learn on the fly, I would have never gotten into photography. It sure beats developing a roll of film just to find out they all suck and you have no idea why.

[Nick Siebers]

On a week long trip to Yellowstone, I spent a whole day on spot meter without knowing it. Couldn't figure out what the heck was going on, exposure was swinging around like crazy, way too light, way too dark. Ugh. When I finally noticed it, I remembered how I had given my camera to my wife for a few shots, and she was adjusting it. <sigh>.