Know Your Equipment
Sometimes images fail through no fault of yours; instead, your equipment fails you. New cameras and lenses can arrive with defects or quirks. Old cameras that have been put away for a while might have shutter speeds that are way off. Each camera is different and requires attention to the details that may affect image quality.
You can prevent equipment failures and nasty surprises by testing all new equipment when you buy it. If it's a new film camera body, load the film you know the best and feel most comfortable shooting. If it is a digital camera, read the support material and be sure you know where all the important controls are. Test out elements such as the built-in exposure system and various shutter speeds and settings.
Talk to other owners of the same model of camera and lenses. They may have discovered bugs or tricks that will be useful. Check out the technical forums online for tips from other users who have been shooting for awhile with the same model.
As your photography skills evolve, you'll probably find that your tastes will change, and the composition, contrast, focus, lighting, and cropping choices you make today may seem a bit stale or downright boring at a later time.
Some lenses are more prone to flare from bright light hitting the front glass of the lens, causing streaks or blobs of light on the film. Test the limits of your lenses by shooting in the direction of bright light to find out which lenses are more forgiving. Wide-angle lenses will often let you put a bright object directly in the image with no problem. Some telephotos go nuts if you even think about doing a strongly backlit picture. The solution is to only use backlight-friendly lenses when the backlight is intense or to position the camera so the front of the lens is in the shade.
Before any important shoot, visually inspect the inside of your film camera body for chips or other foreign objects that may have fallen into it. Check both body and lenses for lint and other matter that might obscure the picture or scratch the film.
Run a roll or two of film through your camera. Test the lenses you plan to use. Also check flash sync. In the case of digital cameras, be sure to clear all old images off your memory card, put in new batteries, and charge your rechargeable battery. Check that your lenses are clean and flash(es) are working properly.
If you're planning to shoot with film that you haven't used before or that you aren't familiar with, shoot a couple of test rolls to get a feeling for it. If you have your film processed at a new lab, find out which films they prefer to work with. Then take an entire roll with a mix of correct exposures plus over and underexposures to find out which turns out best. If you know what your negatives are supposed to look like and your finished prints do not look right, the lab might need to adjust its developing time to give you the results you're after.
What's the best way to test a new camera?
Take it for a spin. For film cameras, test your equipment with color slide film. You'll be able to see problems more clearly by examining slides than by viewing prints. Both cameras and handheld light meters may produce exposure errors in very bright or very dim light. Test your equipment at both extremes.
While color processing should be uniform at a good lab, black-and-white processing is another story. Many labs are not black-and-white specialists and will overdevelop this film. The film processor's choice of black-and-white chemistry — and there are many — and processing techniques determine the quality of the negative and the final print image.
If you plan to shoot digitally, many processing issues are easier for you to control before you give the files to a processor to have prints made. Dependable digital labs use archival-quality materials to make prints, and files can be uploaded and printed in just days. Some have local outlets where you can pick up your prints within forty-eight hours or less of submitting the files. Comparing prints from three labs of the same sample digital images will quickly tell you which one is right for you. More and more places are offering digital prints at local levels for quick processing and pickup. Quality is generally good, but you will usually pay slightly more for these prints than for the online ones, even with shipping taken into account.
