Just one shot
Welcome to week two of the challenge yourself series. This week, we will explore another one of my favorite self-imposed challenges. I provide this series as much for me as my readers. It helps to keep me focused and challenged in my shooting, and each week I am forced to participate in my challenge because I want to provide current example images for the articles.
This weeks challenge will be to take only one picture on your photo walk. Don’t be tempted to cheat now, just go out on your photo walk and look through the camera at interesting scenes. When I am doing this and I see something I am interested in I make a mental note to come back later and take that shot. For the purposes of this challenge, just spend a lot of time looking at possible shots, but don’t take that shot until your really ready and sure it is the one you want. For an added challenge I like to add manual mode shooting into the mix rather than one of the automatic modes. Use the cameras meter to get as close as you can. I like to meter and go off the camera’s suggestion minus one stop so if it suggests f11 as the aperture I will most times take the shot at f8 as I like the saturation increase a slightly underexposed shot gives.
As with our last challenge, take that shot and post process to completion, you will notice that the more you do this challenge the better your shots will become overall because it forces you to think long and hard about not only the composition, but the camera settings before you take that shot. I have more terrible shots from this exercise than I would be willing to admit. But, as time went along and I continued this challenge, I noticed that my ability to setup a shot increased dramatically. I am now able after a couple of years doing this challenge once a month to get a good shot thats correctly exposed and composed reasonably at least fifty percent of the time. This may seem like a low success percentage, but I don’t cheat and I don’t take multiple shots I go with the one I got and evaluate it rigorously after I am back home.
Next week, we will continue the challenges I hope your following me along in these they are a lot of fun and you can learn a lot if you take the time and follow along.
