Read any photography magazine or blog, and one of the most popular (or at least repetitively occurring) topics is how you should eliminate bad habits as a photographer. Apparently, these bad habits are no good for your career or for your craft as a creative individual. Well, if you’ve hung on every last word of those articles, then prepare to have your world turned upside down.

In this piece, we argue that certain bad habits in photography are actually… good for you! They help you become a better, more meticulous photographer who’s invested in and excels in a particular type of shot. So what’s wrong with that, exactly?

photo by Daniel Dionne

Things aren’t quite so black and white in photography. There’s room for a lot of flexibility, especially when it comes to how you approach your art form.

Being Happy Go Lucky

Too many photographers are perfectionists from everything from the actual shot down to their clients’ reactions. Some photographers would really scorn an attitude that advocates being mellow and not pushing for perfection, but that’s what we’re telling you to try.

By learning and accepting that you can’t control the weather, the random factors at any given location and, yes, your clients’ reactions or even behaviours during a shoot, you improve your game.

Sure, this sounds like a Buddhist approach (we may even throw in some mindfulness meditation later on!), but seasoned photographers will already know this. The danger with being a perfectionist is that you establish standards that are excessively high and, accordingly, out of reach, at least by most reasonable estimates.

You’ll only end up becoming disappointed and, ultimately, frustrated with photography, which is not how to approach your craft.

Being Late

This doesn’t mean show up late to your photo shoots! This is a reference to delivering your final images to clients – it’s more than okay to take your time when you’re editing your clients’ images.

After all, you want to turn in your very best, most high-quality work to your clients. Anything less would reflect poorly on you and slowly but surely erode your reputation as a professional photographer.

Don’t think that you have to be super-efficient in providing your clients’ final images to them exactly when you said you would. There’s something to be said about quality over timeliness. Some photographers find that they can only put in so much editing time at a time to produce high-quality work. If you want to have clients who are really impressed with your pictures, you’ll take your sweet time in the editing process.

No client is ever really upset with getting his pictures later than expected, but every client will usually be upset with getting sub-par images!

Regularly Experiencing Anxiety

When you’ve done something for the zillionth time, you tend to become so good at it that you just naturally relax. Or, at least, that’s how the old thinking goes, anyway!

In photography, it may not be a bad thing to be somewhat anxious each and every time before you head off to a shoot. It doesn’t matter if it’s a brand-new shoot for a new project or a shoot for an old, dependable client whom you’ve photographed dozens of times before.

Being anxious simply keeps you on your toes, so that you’re primed to do the best for your clients each time. Just ask the world’s top athletes and performers: They’re all anxious before the big game or competition, even though they’ve done it a hundred times before already! That should tell you something about the usefulness of a healthy sense of anxiety for anything that you tackle.

If you experience anxiety before a photo shoot, that simply means you’ll be double as careful to check to see that you’ve got all your equipment and are ready to provide a killer service to your clients. As a result, you both win.

Limiting Yourself to Just One Shooting Specialty

It makes sense when you think about it: You become really good at something when you focus all of your faculties on just that one thing. Here’s an analogy: Doctors specialize in a certain part of the body. You wouldn’t expect your heart doctor to also be an orthopaedic surgeon, would you? Of course, not!

So, as with photography, why would you want to be a jack of all trades? It’s just going to spread your efforts and time out too thinly, thereby dooming your chances to really excel at a particular type of shot, which can truly build your photography career.

There are so many different kinds of photography to try: portrait, wedding, landscape, food, urban decay, and black-and-white photography… just to name a few. Now, when you also throw in the more trick-based types of photography, the list swells even huger to include genres like bokeh, infrared, smoke art, macro and kinetic photography… just to name a few. Whew – it was exhausting just to type out such a long list!

As you should hopefully see by now, it doesn’t really pay to specialize in more than just one (or maybe two, interrelated genres) type of photography because you really won’t be specializing in them if you spread yourself too thin. You’re going to merely be dabbling in many of them, which will hurt your career since you can’t build up your brand as a photographer who specializes just in this particular type of shot.

So pick a style you highly enjoy, go with it, and get really, really good at it to grow your reputation and business more efficiently.

Some Bad Habits Are Unfairly Branded

To be perfectly honest with you, yes, some bad habits are entirely bad and should be stopped. The big one that comes to mind right now is obviously picking your nose (as your mom used to tell you!). Nonetheless, not all bad habits, especially when it comes to photography, are gross or detrimental, so you shouldn’t be worried about stopping them any time soon.

Do you take too long to edit your clients’ pictures? That just means you’re meticulous; keep doing that. Are you always getting butterflies in your stomach before a shoot? That just means that you want to perform the best you can for your clients; keep doing that, too!

Do you have any photography-related bad habits that you think you should keep around? Tell us via Twitter or Facebook.