Five Photo Challenges to Improve your Photography
Whether you are struggling with a lack of creativity or just looking to improve your eye for great shots, here are a few different ways to do it. Each one is great fun to complete and definitely helps you practice composition and editing, as well as give you tons of material for your social media like instagram.
Photo a Day for 30 Days
This Challenge is fairly self-explanatory. The point is to just take a photo everyday, specifically one that you are happy to share, be it on social media or with your friends. If you take the time to think about what you like about your shot once you have it, it will make it easier to not only find your style, but also ingrain it and make it easier to see those shots in your mind's eye.
Black and White
The thing about shooting in black and white is that it emphasises textures and tones generally. Whereas colour tends to distract from that. For this challenge, shoot a series of photographs in just Black and White. Somethings that tend to work well in black and white are textures, views with higher contrast, minimalist views like that in the photo above.
Give it a go and lets see how they turn out!
Same Subject or Specific Type of Composition
Another popular challenge is to photograph the same subject in various places. Some people do this while travelling and they take a little toy around with them to photograph in the various places they visit. Likewise you could use the same composition through your series of shows. For example, if you want to practice a certain composition technique like leading lines, then try and take leading line shots whenever you see them.
If you are looking to learn composition, then check out our tutorial here
Take only one lens when heading out
This one is one of my favourite challenges and it tends to have more of an impact if you shoot with prime lenses. If you shoot with prime lenses then you have to move forward or backwards to change the composition, whereas when you shoot with a zoom lens, you have way more latitude if you can't get as close to your subject, or need to use a wider angle or want to change the compression behind the subject. It takes a little more problem solving to work out a composition that works when you only have one focal length to work with.
Photograph mundane Items
This one is admittedly a bit tough. Photograph things like your coffee cup or you car on the street or your desk and try and make it look epic or something you would be proud to share around. If you can manage to do that, then composition should be fairly simple for you.
There are many ways to challenge your creativity, the biggest thing is getting out there and putting effort into the shot you take. Find out what your weakest area is, and practice that. Also, if you post your shots on instagram, tag them with #thesecretphoto, we would love to see what you come up with and we might feature them too! until next week, keep shooting guys!