Every photographer from amateurs to professionals makes mistakes when taking photos. In the old film days you could only find the bad results after processing the negatives. With digital cameras like the Digital SLR camera you can see your mistakes immediately after taking the photo through the LCD screen.

There are many types of mistakes that photographers make. Some of them are more obvious than others and some are easier to avoid. The first step to eliminating those mistakes is knowing what they are and what causes them. Understand the mistakes and the reasons will help you identify and avoid problematic scenes.

As sophisticated and automatic the Digital SLR camera is you will make plenty of mistakes taking photos, it is hard to completely eliminate those. Here are some of the more common mistakes photographers like you make:

Taking out of focus photos. We can all identify those after they are taken, the photo looks blurry with low contrast. Out of focus are useless and almost always need to be discarded. The Digital SLR camera can auto focus on most object in most scenes but in some special cases the auto focus mechanism will just fail. Such cases include for example two objects that are very far from each other, low lighting conditions and more.

Unwanted camera movements also result in useless digital photos. If you move the camera while the photo is being taken the result will be a blurry photo. Usually when the shutter speed is very fast this would not be noticeable. In conditions however where the shutter speed is set to low for example in low lighting conditions every small camera movement will completely blur the photo and make it useless. In such cases you should try to use a tripod or if not available use other techniques to stabilize the camera such as leaning against a hard and stable surface.

Dark photos without much details are usually a result of underexposure. Underexposure happens when the camera is not set correctly to the lighting conditions. The Digital SLR camera can automatically set the exposure based on the measured ambient light. In some cases however such measurements fail for example if there is a strong light source but the photo details are in a shaded area.

The opposite of underexposure is overexposure. Overexposure happens when the Digital SLR camera exposure is set not correctly assuming there is less light than there really is. Overexposed photos are very bright and smudged.

A common problem in many photos is shaded objects. Although the Digital SLR camera can measure ambient light sometime an object in the scene would have some shades on it. For example a person wearing a hat while the sun shines from above can have his face shaded since the hat blocks the sun light. The camera sensors can not pick up on those shades as they measure ambient light. To compensate in such cases a fill-in flash is needed.

Red eye is one of the most common effects of flash photography. Eliminating red eye completely is hard. The best methods to doing that are using the pre flash system and if possible a bounce flash as opposed to flash that hits the object eyes directly.