The photography challenge is a daily exercise that aims to help you become more creative in photography.
Skills are like muscles — you need to flex them regularly, or you’d suffer from atrophy. Even when you think you’re already comfortable using a camera, it’s always healthy to learn new tricks and techniques to add to your experience.
If you want to take part of this challene, then come over to our facebook group and post your photography challenge pictures. It’s an active community where people will give you feedback on your images and inspire you to capture better photos.
Day 1: Capture The Alphabet
Choose a subject that corresponds with each letter of the alphabet. It probably sounds easy, but once you dig into it, you will see this is a task that tests your ability to find worthwhile subjects that also fit the criteria of the challenge, and some letters will surely prove to be more difficult to fulfill than others.
*Example: Subway pole – letter I
Day 2: Bokeh
This is one of the easiest and most fun photo challenges you can do. Time to open up your lens aperture and capture incredible bokeh shots!
Day 3: Photograph Water
You will need a heavy dose of patience — rest assured there will be a lot of trial and error when it comes to lighting, camera settings and timing, but the takeaway is you’ll learn to make exposure adjustments quickly and learn some great lighting lessons.
Day 4: Self Portrait
Forget selfies and learn to create proper self-portraits using a tripod and a camera. Once you find the right location, set your device to self-timer mode; if you don’t like using a timer, you can also activate it using a remote control. Apart from the artistic aspect of this exercise, it also teaches you firsthand how to recognize and fix bad and awkward poses.
Day 5: Texture
Taking photos of textures is a great way to study how light interacts with surfaces.
Day 6: Sunset
Everyone loves a sunset – particularly photographers. But choosing the best camera settings for sunsets can be a challenge, as you want to capture the sun’s colours as they appear to you, not how your camera thinks they should be.
Below we’ve suggested some of the best camera settings for sunsets; however, we should point out that these are simply a starting point.
- Exposure mode: Manual
- Focus mode: Manual
- Shutter speed: 1/30sec or longer
- Aperture: f/16
- ISO: 100 or lower
- Lens: 18-24mm
- Drive mode: Single-shot
- White balance: Daylight
Day 7: Street portraits
Get out of your comfort zone and take portraits of people in different situations. Ask a bunch of people on the street to shoot their portraits and aim to get 5 people saying ‘no’. It’s reverse psychology for you – and it really works to help boost your confidence.
Day 8: Food
Food photography opens the door to so many possibilities, such as food blogging, Instagramming, writing e-books, product photography and more! It’s also a creative outlet and a fun way to play with colour and express your own style.
Day 9: Reflections
Reflections are everywhere! And they can bring all kinds of interesting feelings and elements into your images; like abstraction, intrigue, mystery and beautiful patterns.
Day 10: Macro
Macro photography is all about making small items look larger than life. Anything from insects, flowers, and plants can become the focus of your photos.
Day 11: Action
Action photography is when your subject is in constant motion and you are trying to take pictures in the midst of this.
Day 12: Your favourite TV show
Recreate a favourite scene from your TV-Show.
Day 13: What subject are you most scared to shoot? Shoot that.
Make a list if needed and pick the hardest thing for you. Why? Because fear is what holds us back from being better photographers.
Day 14: Silhouette
We often take silhouette shots on accident. For today’s photo challenge, your task is to take silhouette images on purpose.
Save your photos and share them with us on social media by using the hashtag #lensationalmagazinechallenge, or post them on our facebook group. Good luck!
