> Not opening a picture on a computer and viewing it at 100%

No, this is exactly backwards. The worst things you can do is stare at 100% crops of pictures, like the retards on “photography” (read: “gear”) forums, to try and find flaws in them. The vast majority of people (everyone but the retards mentioned, who would look at a classic Ansel Adams picture and complain about grain) don’t care about slight unsharpness, noise, etc. The fundamentals of a picture are much, *much* more important than that.

> Deleting pictures based on LCD monitor on back of camera

I’m confused, because later you mention that things that look good on your LCD might not look good viewed at a reasonable size, and I agree on the latter. But if it sucks on your LCD, it’s almost invariably going to suck when viewed larger.

> Shooting everything in Program or Auto Exposure mode

We have automation for a reason, and if you’d like to prove me wrong, I have a 1954 Voigtlander Vito B I can lend you. It means you spend less time concentrating on technical trivia and more time taking photos. In the time that it takes you to take a shot, check the LCD, change the shutter speed or aperture, take a photo, check the LCD, etc etc, you could have missed a few seconds of really great light, or your subject could have flown or walked off out of boredom.

Wait, you’re using the meter to gauge your exposure? Then what’s the point in shooting fully manual? Nearly every automatic camera since Canon’s T90 from 1986 has a shiftable program and/or exposure compensation, which makes this irrelevant.

(“Auto”, however, is just plain rude. I might agree with you on that.)

> Too many folks see that the price of digital SLRs are becoming so close to point and shoot models that they assume the learning curve will be similar

Digital SLRs, apart from their myriad stupid autofocus settings, have *exactly* the same number of critical settings as their point-and-shoot siblings. You need to set white balance, exposure compensation, ISO, and (under the less-automatic-but-still-automatic modes) aperture or shutter speed on *any* camera. Digital SLRs just make it faster to adjust those settings. (All digital SLRs still suck, by the way, but that’s something for another day.)

I’m wondering how you square this with your advice about shooting fully manual. Have you ever looked at the menus of a point-and-shoot? Can you imagine having to dig through *these* for a shot in quickly-vanishing light?

> Not buying enough memory cards

Sorry, I’ve never filled a reasonably-sized memory card on any camera. If you’re not blasting a digital SLR in its continuous shooting mode all the time (or a pro who cannot afford to screw up a shot) and still find yourself filling up memory cards, it’s time to start thinking about your photos rather than blasting off as many shots as you can, spraying-and-praying in the hope that you might get a passable shot.

> Not researching computer to determine post production capability

Pft. Any computer made since about 2001 will do fine for the basic tweaks on any photo. I’ve worked on 30+ megapixel film scans without any problems on a 1.4ghz Athlon with 368mb RAM. (Yup, if you’re doing some HDR stuff, then yeah, you’ll need a lot of RAM. HDR is stupid, as are all post-processing tricks that can turn a boring photo into a good one, and that is one of the *real* traps that photography newbies, or even not-so-newbies, fall into.)

And with the owner’s manual, I still keep mine even though I’ve had my camera for 3 years. For example, I needed to use the built-in intervalometer for a specific shoot. I couldn’t figure out how to use it as I’ve never had to. So I read the manual.

I keep the manual in my camera bag.

Thanks Pete.