What are some bad photographic habits that took you a long time to break? Or, asked differently, what are some mistakes that you just keep making, even though you know better?
In my case:
I used to habitually choose the widest aperture available, because the blurrier the background, the better, right? Well, not really, for a few reasons. 1) If you're alwaying blurring the background to the max, you're not truly making a creative decision about depth of field; 2) You're taking a big risk because slight focussing errors have a greater chance of ruining your shot.
I still forget to check my ISO when moving from one lighting condition to another. Leaving my camera on 1600 or higher ISO really makes for annoyingly noisy images. (I don't like auto ISO.)
I still tend to fill the entire viewfinder with my subject. This was fine until I started printing my photos more often, and I quickly realized that the 3:2 aspect ratio of my images is awkward when the composition is super tight and you want to make 5x7 prints. It turns out that "uncropping" is not available in Photoshop =)
The reason I ask is because I want to make sure there are not other bad habits that I don't even know I have.