Why Don’t My Pictures Look Like This?

Last week, I shared these four photos with my Breakfast Stock Club Premium members…

 

 

This week, we challenged two of my newest coworkers (who have never studied photography) to recreate these same pictures with their point-and-shoot and entry-level SLR cameras.

Here are the results…

You’ll notice a common theme in the photos featured in this video – most are either out of focus or the focus point isn’t where it should be in the photo.

This is a common mistake a lot of amateurs make but it’s an easy fix.  Stay tuned tomorrow for Rich’s report on how to get this right in your camera.  And later this week I’ll send you another short video on how to fix some of these images in a photo editing program like Lightroom.

We can’t fix focus issues.  And we can’t fix photos taken with an on-camera flash.  But we can fix some of the exposure problems as well as some of the images that look flat and two dimensional.  We’ll show you how later this week.

Also note: When I say “be sure to look at your photos at 100%,” I mean you’ll need to magnify them at 100% in your photo editing software to verify that the most important details are in focus. If you hover over the 1:1 ratio at the very top of the left sidebar in Lightroom (next to the words “Fit” and “Fill”), you’ll see that it says “zoom photo to 100%.”

[Editor’s Note: Learn more about how you can turn your pictures into cash in our free online newsletter The Right Way to Travel.  Sign up here today and we’ll send you a new report, Selling Photos for Cash: A Quick-Start Guide, completely FREE.]