Beginners’ mistakes are free. (Well, psychologically at least.) But you should still learn from them—even more than from your successes. And sometimes you can learn about them before they happen. So let’s take a look at photographers’ most common mistakes.

There are a few basics that you must keep in mind if you want to take the kind of pictures that other people will enjoy looking at. Keeping a straight horizon is definitely one of them. Take care of this in-camera when you can. But when you can’t, all is not lost!

There are a number of ways to give pictures a dreamlike atmosphere. Among them is the “Orton Effect,” which helps you give pictures one-of-a-kind atmosphere in just a few simple steps.

Photography is literally painting with light, and so no photo can come from a scene where there’s no light at all. And even low-light sites have a problem: poor exposure. What can we do to get good pictures out of bad light?