How do you get good at something? Practice. On the face of it, that seems like an obvious prescription until you ask the natural follow-up: practice what? One of the time-honoured practice techniques that photographers use to maintain their edge is the self-assignment. This is exactly what it sounds like: tell yourself to shoot something specific, give yourself a deadline, and then complete the assignment.
These exercises help you achieve many things: expand your boundaries, train your eye to see in a different way or give your creativity a tune-up. Before the rise of digital equipment, the self assignment could turn into an expensive indulgence since a lot of shots would be rejects but you’d still have to pay for film processing. With digital, that ongoing cost isn’t there, so you can feel free to shoot dozens or hundreds of images on your road to photographic self-improvement.
Self-assignments work best if they push you out of your comfort zone. If you always photograph outdoors, there’s nothing like an indoor assignment to force you to explore your camera’s ISO settings or how to use flash and other artificial lighting techniques. If you always shoot landscapes, assign yourself portraits and a whole new set of challenges and possibilities will open up.
Self assignments can help you re-train your photographic eye by forcing you to look differently at something, particularly something you’ve seen so often it’s become invisible. This could be a building or monument or even a nondescript scene you’ve walked by dozens of times before. Give yourself the assignment to take 25 different photos of that subject during a fixed period of time. This will challenge you take another look and push beyond the “nothing here worth photographing” mentality. You might try shots from far away, or macro shots of interesting details You can explore the differences between taking the object’s lit and shadowed sides, or choose different times - morning, afternoon and night - to shoot the subject.
Sometimes you need to get over shutter shyness, so try a speed shoot – 50 exposures in five minutes for example. That’s a frame every six seconds, and when you have to shoot that fast, you don’t have the luxury of analysing each shot, but neither will you have the chance to talk yourself out of taking it. It can help you see and shoot on an entirely new level – almost by reflex.
Sometimes you can work it from the other end. Rather than 50 shots in five minutes, restrict yourself to just one frame for your entire session. Rather than suppressing your analysis as the speed shoot does, this assignment will train you to study the subject even more deeply, and help you pick out the single most significant aspect you want to photograph.
Another exercise on the theme of restricting yourself is using just one lens, which means just one focal length. Most of us have a zoom lens on our cameras, so a variation that achieves the same thing is to limit yourself to using just one zoom setting. If you always seem to be shooting with the lens set at telephoto, give yourself an assignment to shoot only wide angle photos for a day. Zoom lenses tend to make us lazy because it’s much easier to hit the zoom control than physically move closer to or further from the subject. Perspective depends on subject to camera distance, however, so you’ll get quite different compositions by moving you and your camera to a new vantage point. This is a particularly good assignment for us zoom-addicted shooters.
You can build a self assignment on virtually any theme: colour (photograph only red things for a day), shape or pattern (look for star shapes) or location (if you live in a big city, look for the 10 or 20 most interesting shop windows). For other ideas, type “photography self assignment” into a search engine and you’ll come up with lots of different approaches.
Once you’ve finished your shoot, it is important to go through the images and analyse them. You can revel in the great shots you’ve created, but often you’ll see a frame and think, “that’s not what I was expecting.” Figuring out why something didn’t work is as important as celebrating what did.
These exercises help you achieve many things: expand your boundaries, train your eye to see in a different way or give your creativity a tune-up. Before the rise of digital equipment, the self assignment could turn into an expensive indulgence since a lot of shots would be rejects but you’d still have to pay for film processing. With digital, that ongoing cost isn’t there, so you can feel free to shoot dozens or hundreds of images on your road to photographic self-improvement.
Self-assignments work best if they push you out of your comfort zone. If you always photograph outdoors, there’s nothing like an indoor assignment to force you to explore your camera’s ISO settings or how to use flash and other artificial lighting techniques. If you always shoot landscapes, assign yourself portraits and a whole new set of challenges and possibilities will open up.
Self assignments can help you re-train your photographic eye by forcing you to look differently at something, particularly something you’ve seen so often it’s become invisible. This could be a building or monument or even a nondescript scene you’ve walked by dozens of times before. Give yourself the assignment to take 25 different photos of that subject during a fixed period of time. This will challenge you take another look and push beyond the “nothing here worth photographing” mentality. You might try shots from far away, or macro shots of interesting details You can explore the differences between taking the object’s lit and shadowed sides, or choose different times - morning, afternoon and night - to shoot the subject.
Sometimes you need to get over shutter shyness, so try a speed shoot – 50 exposures in five minutes for example. That’s a frame every six seconds, and when you have to shoot that fast, you don’t have the luxury of analysing each shot, but neither will you have the chance to talk yourself out of taking it. It can help you see and shoot on an entirely new level – almost by reflex.
Sometimes you can work it from the other end. Rather than 50 shots in five minutes, restrict yourself to just one frame for your entire session. Rather than suppressing your analysis as the speed shoot does, this assignment will train you to study the subject even more deeply, and help you pick out the single most significant aspect you want to photograph.
Another exercise on the theme of restricting yourself is using just one lens, which means just one focal length. Most of us have a zoom lens on our cameras, so a variation that achieves the same thing is to limit yourself to using just one zoom setting. If you always seem to be shooting with the lens set at telephoto, give yourself an assignment to shoot only wide angle photos for a day. Zoom lenses tend to make us lazy because it’s much easier to hit the zoom control than physically move closer to or further from the subject. Perspective depends on subject to camera distance, however, so you’ll get quite different compositions by moving you and your camera to a new vantage point. This is a particularly good assignment for us zoom-addicted shooters.
You can build a self assignment on virtually any theme: colour (photograph only red things for a day), shape or pattern (look for star shapes) or location (if you live in a big city, look for the 10 or 20 most interesting shop windows). For other ideas, type “photography self assignment” into a search engine and you’ll come up with lots of different approaches.
Once you’ve finished your shoot, it is important to go through the images and analyse them. You can revel in the great shots you’ve created, but often you’ll see a frame and think, “that’s not what I was expecting.” Figuring out why something didn’t work is as important as celebrating what did.
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