Photography Tip of the Week #090
PhotoBlock Challenge: 365+1
090 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
It is our custom to offer a challenge every tenth episode. Each challenge is designed to help you better your photography skills. This challenge is a doozy. You may have heard of a 365 project. I propose a similar project, but with a simple twist. The standard 365 project is to simply “take” a photo each day. That takes a certain level of commitment, but it has the downside of not giving you much of a direction. You can get photoblock or even worse, get in a rut. So I offer up the following alterations to help you, and myself along on this photographic journey.
1) You need to make a photo each day. You don’t have to post everyday, but you need to have some sort of mechanism of posting a single photo from each day. In my case I’ll post all of my photos to this blog for the day the photo was taken with the tag 365+1. By the way, you don’t have to use the same camera, you can use your cel phone.
2) Here’s the big twist, you need to have a common element or subject for each photo. In my case I’m going to use a small stuffed animal. It’s very portable and it’ll be nice to see how the animal weathers and changes through the year. It can almost become a photographic Where’s Waldo.
3) If you miss a day (you don’t want to) you have to start over. But if something happens to your subject item, pick something similar and continue.
And finally I have something I’d like for you to do for (or to) me. I’d like a list of places, looks, or themes you want me to do for my challenge. Just reply to this posting with your ideas. I’m not a world travel, so don’t state a specific place, but general places like “driving a car” or “in the woods” is fair game. Ideally I’d love to have 365 great ideas so I’ll be challenged everyday to try to make a photo for each concept you post. Don’t forget to tell your friends and see if you can come up with some really interesting ideas.
Oh, by the way, I’m starting today. I see no reason to wait until the first of the year. I never believed in New Year’s Resolutions. If there’s something you need to do or change, there’s no need to wait, start now. What will you pick for your subject? I’m really excited to see what challenges you will send me.
Photography Tip #80 Challenge follow-up
I got a lot of reasonable guesses through comments posted and e-mails, but none of them were exactly correct. In order to creat the effect you will need a card to put in front of your lens. I use some photo paper printed with the color(s) I want. In the center of the card you put a small hole. You can vary the size of the hole depending on how much of the color you want to filer through.
But in order to make this work, you have to lock your focus either by half pressing the shutter or snapping a photo of your scene first and then switching to manual mode.
Then it’s a simple matter of placing the card in front of the lens and making your image through the small hole you’ve created. Vary the size of the hole or the colors to get different looks. All you need is a colored card and a way to make that hole and you can start making some interesting effect without the use of Photoshop. And depending on the thickness of the card, you can create a different sort of vignette.
The Photography Tip of the Week #080
Photoblock Challenge
080 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
As is the custom here every 10th photography tip will be a photo block challenge. This one will be a bit different, because I’m not going to give you a photographic task. I’m going to challenge you by asking what did I do to make the following couple of images. In each case the effect is done “in camera,” no Photoshop work or digital effects. It’s also extremely simple and doesn’t really require any special equipment, and can be done with any type of camera. I really would like to know your theories as to how this effect was achieved. I will give you the answer later this week in a followup podcast/blog post. And just so you know, I stripped the metadata from the posted images, so that won’t give you any clues.
Take a Hike
In a couple of days I’ll be part of the Third Annual World Wide Photowalk. I’ll once again be a walk leader this year and I’ve chosen to use Tanglewood park as our backdrop this year. The only problem will be it’s going to be really hot so I’ll need a lot of water, ice and shade for all who attend. Each year I like to try to come up with something that’ll be a twist. Last year we did our walk at a winery. We got to do the full tour, have a tasting and photograph a bunch of grapes and a whole slew of other nifty things.
This year I wanted to make sure we could do some amazing photos. Tanglewood Park is wonderfully scenic, but what will make it better is having people to model and pose for the photographers. So I was shooting for at least a few and now I may have a small horde. This is going to be so much fun. There’s still time to register, you don’t have to be a “professional” to go, just enthusiastic about photography.
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The Photography Tip of the Week #070
Photoblock Challenge – One Shot
070 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)
The shot I waited for during my challenge.
There are many benefits of digital photography over ye-old film days. Instant feedback being the primary benefit, but the second important benefit is the ability to take a limitless number of photos for relatively no added cost. If you shoot in JPG, you can get thousands of photos on a single memory card. And if you shoot RAW, thousands of photos are still achievable. I like this ability, because I know that not every shot is going to be great and this gives me a lot to choose from. Yet there in lies the problem. We can amass a huge library of photos in relatively a short period of time with the bulk of the photos being junk. A few years back I showed my portfolio to a mentor and he thumbed through it really fast and said, “You walk too fast.” I instantly knew what he meant and we all fall victim to it during first years of the digital photography craze. Since we can photograph nearly indefinitely, we think it’s our duty to do so. What made photographers great years ago still holds true today, they took their time to make a truly great photo. So the challenge is to turn your digital camera into a film camera for a short period of time.
Scott Kelby had a version of this challenge a month or so ago. In his challenge, he stated that you could only shot 36 exposures, you had to cover up your LCD and you couldn’t look at the photos for at least 24 hours. I have a short version of the same challenge and that is to:
Set aside one hour and only take a single photograph.
Since you can only take one shot, you will find rather quickly that you will want to make that shot count and you will do everything you can to make a truly great photo. If you don’t know what to photograph, then do something like the sunset. At what point is the best photo going to happen? You’ll have to wait for it and see. But once you make the shot, pack it up. Don’t sit around and see if something better will come, you had the one shot, now see what you can do with it.
So why should you do this challenge? As you learn to control when you press the shutter button, you will reduce the amount of time it takes to dump the photos off your memory card. You will severely cut down on the number of images you need to cull, and cut down on the hard disk space required to store that amassed digital dogpile. Not to mention the transfer time required for backup to an online service like backblaze. All-in-all your digital photo life will be much simpler and you will have much more note worthy photos to share.
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I am a top photographer in the Mocksville, North Carolina Professional Photographers guide on MarketingTool.com.
