The Photography Tip of the Week #009

Posted by Philip in Podcast

Photography Tip of the Week 009 (audio)
Photo Block Challenge
From time-to-time we are all infected a horrible debilitating disease.  It afflicts everyone young and old.  It knows not status, faith, or education.  You will get it just like everyone else and it will cause you to sit around with a camera in your hand with not a single exposure taken.  What is this disease?  It’s Photo Block, that inability to take a single picture.  Nothing seems reasonable, funny or artistic to you.  As the depression begins to set in, know that there is relief.  This is not a cure, but it will treat the symptoms with dramatic results.  What’s the cost of this miracle treatment?  Absolutely nothing.  It comes in the form of a photographic challenge.

The rules of this challenge are quite simple:
1) You must set aside 30-60 minutes.  Let your family know that you will be unavailable for the time period if necessary.
2) You must take a roll worth of images.  What’s a roll worth in a digital camera? Let’s just say 40-50 images.
3) You can’t take more than one image of the same thing from the same location.

This challenge is to pick a room of your house.  Pick it now.  It makes no difference which room, big or little, clean or messy.  You will now take photos.  Stand up, sit down, crawl on the floor or even stand in a chair.  But you need to take a roll worth of photos in your time period.  Be careful to pick a subject for each photo.  You are not taking random shots.  You need to focus on an object for each shot and to anyone that see’s these images they must know the subject of your photo without asking.  Get in really close if you have to.  Treat each shot as if it’s going to be your next great masterpiece.  There are no limitations on camera settings.  If you want to shoot full auto, that’s fine.  Want to use a flash, fine.  No flash? Good.

The point of this exercise is to just take pictures of things you normally wouldn’t.  It’s amazing how much you learn about your camera and surroundings when you do a little exercise like this.  For this challenge you can take things out of the room, but you shouldn’t bring anything in.  You already picked your room.  And for me, I had my wife pick the room for me.  Of course, I didn’t tell her why until after she picked the room.

Here are a few of the photos I took.

How did you fare?