Photocritic photography blog

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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This entry is © Haje Jan Kamps / Photocritic.org, and was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.