It’s that time of year, all of the young people are busy figuring out their new school year. Many of you may be heavily involved in your children returning to school and all that goes along with that. It’s also a fantastic time to get out and about with your camera no matter which hemisphere you may reside. It’s a season of change and transition everywhere, especially for those farther away from the equator. In most geographies, it’s not too hot or too cold to enjoy the outdoors for almost everyone.
I’m not going to talk exclusively about the northern hemisphere’s fall color, but that’s a fine reason to get out with your camera too. In the spirit of back to school, I really want to advocate all of us going back to school in our photographic endeavors. The back-to-school season is not typically the time of travel to far-away places; instead, it’s a time of getting back to the routines of being at home, the workday rather than the excitement of new surroundings. Rather than wanderlust daunting your photographic desires, I suggest the back-to-school season is a fantastic time to hone your skills and better prepare yourself for your next far-away adventure.
Here’s my prescription to going back to school: try it. Forget inspiration being some external force to move you. Go take a walk around your house and neighborhood. If that seems completely void (it’s not), then take a ride a mile or five miles up the road. Stop at the first thing or place that you remotely imagine has some sort of photographic opportunity. Take a picture but stop yourself right there and resist the urge to just move on to something different, stop yourself from seeking novelty. Instead, look at what you just made that one frame of, look at it as a scene and a subject that is full of possibilities…
This scene is now where you start school, the school of exploration in a different sense than moving on to a different scene. Instead, do this:
Force yourself to make some number of completely different shots. If you need to make up a number, 5, 10, 20, even 3, it doesn’t matter, but make very different shots no matter how you felt about that first one.
Walk into the scene, shoot from different angles, walk around it. Find some detail inside. Shoot it wide, extract details, get really far away and shoot it with a lot of compression if possible.
Ask yourself, what is the story of this scene? The scene doesn’t have to be large or even what you would consider “a scene”. It could be your garage or your child in a particular context, or a stranger.
I’m going to add one more piece to this that will be really challenging and supercharge your creativity and perception. No matter how many shots you decided to force yourself before venturing out, also decide how many of those to use any “special” technique.
What special technique you ask; could be anything but decide on just one to use for a reasonable duration of this exercise. How about slow shutter speeds? Combine that with intentional camera motion if desired. How about multiple exposures (most cameras do that, and a huge number will actually bake those into a RAW file). How about shallow depth-of-field no matter what the scene is to force what is the primary actor in the scene? How about shooting out-of-focus on purpose?
Now do that over the next month with the same set of parameters over and over again. Force yourself to do at least one scene, once a week. If you are out doing that one scene and you can do another one either close by or drive another few miles, turn down a road you’ve never been on. You get the idea.
I do this exercise periodically, especially when the weather is good to be out of doors. I do it on a micro scale when it’s not so nice. When I’m brave enough and overcome my laziness, I’ll even force myself out in the rain. I wish I would do this more, but I generally do it when I am “stuck”. I may not make profound work, but I do come up with ideas, themes, and yes, scenes that eventually become projects. What’s even better when going back to school is how much better my eye and technique are no matter what I’m photographing.