Just after we run our ‘photography with rules’ article, Popular Photography magazine comes along and beats us to it with an even better idea, by declaring January 21st as ‘international shooting-all-the-time’ day!
The concept? Take a photo at least every 5 mintutes for 15 hours of the day. But surely, that is complete and utter madness? Well, no — much for the same reasons that stream of consciousness helps writers getting in touch with their inner voice, and much like brain storming is a much-loved route to corporate grandeur, forcing yourself to keep photographing even when your shutter finger hurts and your ideas are drier than a nun’s hoo-hoo can be a way to develop as a photographer.
Charge up your camera, load it with at least a 1GB card (or have seven or more rolls of 36-exposure film on hand), and be prepared to shoot, shoot, shoot.
Your assignment is to take at least one picture every five minutes during the day. You get eight hours off for sleep, and another hour for…well, stuff you wouldn’t want to involve photography. That’s a minimum of 225 photos.
Your subjects are all up to you. This is to become a better photographer, not just a photo opportunist. That is, you don’t want to be someone who only gets a photo when a postcard-style setting presents itself.
We improve as photographers by forcing ourselves to shoot; by finding the photograph when there doesn’t seem to be one; by studying the light — every kind of light we encounter — and seeing the photo potential in it. Capturing a great image of Angelina Jolie under a softbox is easy. But how about that candy wrapper in the gutter? Or that group of friends posing under a mixture of natural, incandescent, and fluorescent light? Can you still make an outstanding photo when the subject and conditions aren’t perfect?
The time pressure, not to mention the pressure to make as many of the 225-plus photos as good as possible, will be intense. Maddeningly so, I suspect.
But I’m willing to take the chance because I know that by the time January 22 dawns, I will have grown as a photographer. And maybe I’ll even have produced a few amazing images.
I love the idea. If you do well, you can even win a Pentax K100D, so check out the full write-up over on Popular Photography, and get those batteries on charge.
My extra challenge: If you do the frame-storming challenge, put it all into a flickr stream, and tell me how it went!
(thanks, matt, for the tip)
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To me, a portrait doesn’t have to be a flat-on head-and-shoulders photo. Hell, I’ve seen excellent portraits that don’t even have faces in them. The point I’m trying to make is that there are too many people why are just straight-up trying too hard with their portraiture.
Imagine now, if you will, what would happen if you were to put another set of bars, rotated 90 degrees in relation to the first set of bars. In theory, none of the ice-cream sticks would get through, right? Well, that’s how Polarizer filters work, too. Of course, no polarizer filter is perfect, so some light will always get through, but the vast bulk of light is filtered out.
Cross-polarization exploits this by placing objects made of some types of plastic between the first and the second polarizer. For this particular set-up, you’ll want to put your first polarizer in front of the light source, then your plastic object, and then use the second polarizer in front of your lens.
Knowing that the flashgun uses the pre-flash for measuring light gives a hint: Just prevent it from doing light measurements! You can do this by using the flashgun in manual mode: Set the flash output yourself. To find out how much flash you need, either learn how to use your flash (there’s a rather excellent article about this on the 
Shallow DOF and 
Right, I don’t have a lot of time to do a post today, but I just thought out something pretty cool – You all know what I look like, but I have no idea what you all look like. So how about a square portrait challenge?
The first proper portrait I did was April this year. The friend in question was highly suspicious of my abilities, hugely hungover and rather lined and crumpled (he used to smoke 20 a day and had recently given up). I only had a compact digital camera with me at the time and the light was fading rapidly. I put it into sepia and made it look old fashioned because he’d insisted he didn’t want to look ginger on it, the awkward bastard. He was actually quite chuffed with his portrait and has merrily posted it on websites to show people. More importantly though, it stands as a record of how crumpled he actually was, and now, 9 months on, I’ve taken some more photos where he looks a lot less crumpled and he’s pretty pleased about this. This is what giving up smoking does for you.
There was a point to this post (I’ll get there in the end, honestly) and it was that as Christmas has just been and gone there are a lot of people out there who have been let loose with new cameras, or new lenses for old cameras. Basically, the world is not a safe place right now if you’re nervous about having your photo taken. However, for all those new camera owners, you might get a photo worth sticking on your wall if you try out these five things:
