My wife and I recently visited the Auburn Botanic Gardens to admire the Cherry Blossom Festival and take some pictures, and boy were they blurry!
As it turns out, a massive number of other Sydneysiders had the same idea to visit the Auburn Botanic Gardens that day, so when we got there all tickets had long sold out. We still managed to get into the surrounding gardens though, so not all was lost. After taking some ten photos or so I started to review them on the rear screen of my camera. It quickly became apparent that most of the pictures looked rather blurry (see the picture on this blog post for example).
My suspicions got confirmed when zooming in to inspect the finer details: these photos were definitely blurry! How could that have happened? I checked my camera settings and found the culprit: I had forgotten to turn the in-body image stabilisation back on after a previous shoot with a tripod for which I had turned the image stabilisation off. Because I was shooting with a long lens and a relatively slow shutter speed, the camera shake had impacted the sharpness of the pictures.
This started me thinking about the usefulness of a photography checklist.
While most of us will have a mental checklist to run through when preparing for a photo shoot or even individual pictures, the human brain (or memory) tends to fail us from time to time.
Having a checklist available on a mobile phone or a piece of paper may help avoid the mistake I made. For a start, you could make a general checklist for checking things before the start of a photo shoot, including items such as:
Have I packed all the lenses that I require for this shoot?
Are the camera batteries all charged?
Are my lenses and the camera sensor clean of dust and specks?
Do I have my tripod with me?
When it comes time to shoot, it may be helpful to have another checklist specifically for the type of photography you're doing. For example, shooting landscapes requires different camera settings and different composure techniques than say shooting jet fighters at an airshow, taking outdoor portraits of a model, or photographing food in a studio environment. If you're not familiar with these different types of photography, or you're not practicing them often enough, it may be worthwhile to have topic-specific checklists - covering best practices, camera settings, and composition suggestions - available. With that in mind, I have started to prepare a few checklists myself:
Best practices for airshow photography (I'm going to an airshow later this year)
Best practices for flower photography (my wife and I will be visiting the Floriade in Canberra shortly)
Best practices for rodeo photography (sadly the rodeo I was planning to visit got cancelled)
For each of these checklists I have been combining my own experience with things I've learned from photography books, research I have done on the internet, YouTube videos from other photographers that I reviewed, and some common sense (check the image stabilisation settings). Not only was this a good 'refresher exercise', but it also stimulated my creative thinking about photography. Trying to come up with the content for these checklists forces you to think more deliberately about your photography: what depth of field works best for the shot, what lighting are you looking for, what composition best showcases your subject, and how do you get the sharpest possible image. So now the only thing my brain should not forget is to grab that relevant checklist and review its contents before I start shooting...
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