PictureCorrect.com: 25 Photography Cliches You Should Stop Doing Today

Selfies, weird borders, and crappy sunset shots. We’ve all rolled our eyes at these clichés, but what’s worse is that we’ve all been guilty of them at some time or another. In this video, Kai exposes the 25 worst photo clichés that you should avoid doing if you hope to grow as a photographer:

25 Photography Cliches to Avoid (or Else)

1. Taking selfies. Please stop?
2. Bokeh, bokeh, and more bokeh. Bokeh is great—in small doses.
3. Signing your photos. In Kai’s words: “Who do you think you are? Picasso?”
4. Adding cheesy filters. Just… no.
5. Putting text on your photos. A good picture already paints a thousand words.
6. Taking the same-old sunset photos. “Red sky, red sky, red sky, red sky, red sky…”
7. Using obnoxious watermarks. It’s good to protect your work, but if no one can see your photo behind your large opaque branding, then what’s the point of posting it online?
8. Adding borders. Don’t be a noob.
9. Light painting names. Just forget it—the writing would look juvenile anyway.
10. Creating B&W photos with selective colors. Good for poignant tales. Not so good for random flowers.
11. Making B&W artistic nudes. A nude is a nude no matter the color space, people.
12. Blurring waterfalls. If shot incorrectly, blurred waterfalls look like “a load of old ladies’ hairs.”
13. Capturing boring landscape panoramas. 90 percent of landscape panoramas are probably just green grass at the bottom and blue sky at the top.
14. Taking lots of cloud photos. Take photos of cool cloud formations, sure—but don’t make clouds and sunsets your entire portfolio!
15. Inserting fake sun lens flare. Get your own sun flare!
16. Overdoing HDR. HDR is best done tastefully or not at all.
17. Changing better-suited color photos to B&W. Just… why?
18. Using the zoom burst technique. Okay, you can try it ONCE—but never again.
19. Creating dutch angle shots. You’ll have to work hard to set your dutch angle shots apart.
20. Making “postcard” images of tourist attractions. You know those touristy shots that you’ve seen a million times? We don’t need another one floating around out there. Try something new!
21. Photographing people who are less fortunate than you. Everyone photographs homeless people. Make your images unique or don’t make them at all.
22. Taking “I’m a Photographer” selfies. Don’t you do it!
23. Every. Single. Stock. Photo. Ever. Made. Perhaps not every stock photo, but certainly most!
24. Devising optical illusions. You might think you’re clever, but…
25. Photographing people with trollies. Apparently, Kai does this far too often.

You really need to be able to justify using selective color in a black and white. Even then, it’s probably still cheesy.

This article has kicked off quite a discussion here. Let us know what you think! Are all of these techniques cliché or do they become cliché when executed poorly? What is the worst cliché on the list?

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