I went on a photo walk the other day with a friend who mostly shoots events and does client focused work. The majority of the time we just talked about freelance work, but ever now and then we’d see an interesting scene and capture it. We both shot on zoom lenses, but when she would show me her captures I couldn’t help but notice how zoomed in she was.

Every photograph was at like 70mm… I let the first 2 attempts slide, but after attempt number 3 I was like “hey you aren’t supposed to zoom, that’s against the rules!”. She had no idea what I was talking about, I knew this because she responded with “they’re rules?”. I slapped my forehead and proceeded to list off a few dos and don’ts of street photography. After our brief little conversation I noticed that she didn’t really take any more photographs. And at that moment I was knew these rules, they were holding a lot of us back.

See the thing with rules, it’s important to know them, but also important to break them when necessary. In order to progress we have to go against the rules at times. That’s probably how chicken & waffles got started… or brunch as a whole.

In this article I want to go over 10 rules that I think everyone should break. Again, I’m not telling you to break these every time you go out and shoot, but you have to be open to new things…

1. Shoot In Manual Mode Only