Camera and software companies like to say that their products are “easy-to-use,” sometimes forgetting that part of making that actually happen can create unrealistic expectations. But user errors can also be responsible for much of the frustration of capturing, enhancing and printing digital images. So here’s a few tips to minimize that user error and improve your photography at the same time:

Let’s get this out of the way first: Equipment doesn’t make portraits, people do.

Throughout the history of photography, there have been many articles and books written about the rules of composition that purport to offer a path to creating a perfectly composed image.

As a creative medium, what traditionalists call “monochrome” some digital imagers prefer “grayscale,” but it’s still black and white to me. But there is more to black and white photography than just an absence of color.

I’ve always believed that photography was the universal language and somewhere during its 150 years of existence it has evolved a language of its own. Back in the pre-digital days when certain people became more obsessed with the camera, lenses and photographic ephemera than they were with the images that the cameras created, they were called equipment freaks or sometimes equipment snobs.