Street Food

Fujifilm X100F

The Three Wise Men

As I said, the second half of 2017 was a bit of a wilderness for me photographically.  For 2018 I definitely need some motivation and inspiration.  Here’s a quick brainstorm of 52 things to do photographically in 2018.  Take a look, you might even try some yourselves.

1. Take a walk and focus on taking photographs of a particular theme, e.g. red things, women in hats, people on mobile phones, reflections in shop windows.
2. Pretend you have a roll of 36 exposure film, one ISO and colour or black and white (or one film emulation if your camera supports such things).  Take a roll in one day.
3. As for 2) above but take a ‘roll’ a day for seven days.
4. Step out of your comfort zone.  If you normally take portraits take some street, if you take a lot of street take some still life.
5. Try this.
6. Read up on your favourite photographer and then try and emulate his or her style for a week.
7. Visit the Taylor Wessing Portrait Exhibition for 2017/18 at the National Portrait Gallery.  It’s open until 26th February 2018.
8. Choose your favourite tree in your local vicinity and take a picture of it once every month for the whole year.  Not just the same image every month but different parts of the tree.
9. Book a model through ModelMayhem or PurplePort, discuss a theme you want to shoot and go for it.
10. Photograph someone close to you as if you are doing a portrait shoot for a newspaper.  Aim to get that one image that would be used to illustrate a story about her or him.
11. Photograph someone close to you every week for a year.
12. If they are still with you go and photograph your mum or dad.  They won’t be there forever and you may regret not having pictures of them when they are gone.
13. Visit a well known tourist attraction close to you and see if you can capture something unique about it.
14. Enter a photography competition in a magazine.
15. Visit The Photography Show between 17th and 20th March.
16. Enter a portrait into the 2018 Taylor Wessing Portrait competition.
17. Review your photography gear, do you really need all that stuff?  Sell what you don’t need on eBay and use the funds you generate to visit a gallery, take a course or workshop or buy a book to get you inspired.
18. If you can afford it go off on your own for a few days and just take photographs.
19. Buy or borrow a photographer’s biography and see what motivates them to photograph the way they did.  Go out and do what they do (or did).
20. Start a photography blog and/or website.
21. Trawl through the images you took in 2017 and actually print some!  Frame them and hang them on your wall.
22. Really master your preferred photo editing software suite by aiming to learn one new thing about it every day.
23. Take some photographs of where you live.  A good travel photographer can create an image of anywhere and remember chances are your nearest big city or countryside is someone else’s travel destination.
24. If you’ve not tried using studio lights before, hire some (or a studio that has them), get a willing model and go and play for half a day.
25. Read a non-photographic book on creativity to get some inspiration.  Here’s one of my favourites.
26. Realise this but do something about it!
27. Try photographing with intent.  Really spend time analysing a scene, move around looking at different angles and the way the light falls before making your image.
28. Spend a day photographing with a single camera and lens combination, sometimes constraining yourself can lead to more creative images.
29. Read your cameras manual.  How many times do we just pick up a new camera, think we know how to operate it and don’t need to read the manual.  Modern cameras have plethora of features, chances are there are a few you don’t know of that can help you creatively.
30. Pick your favourite photographic genre and google ‘modern masters of xxx photography’.  Find five you really like, study their style to see what makes them masters.
31. Curate your website.  Chances are if your website is more than a year old it could do with a bit of a Spring clean.  Be ruthless and go through it removing images that don’t represent your style or what you want to be known for.
32. Repeat 30 for styles you are not known for and see how those photographers make their art, if they have blogs follow them for a month to see how they work.
33. Write an artists statement to help clarify your ideas about your work.
34. Create a photo book.  There are many great online printers that allow you to do this and they need not cost a fortune.  Make the book on a particular topic or theme and go out and shoot to that.  Spend time over the year doing this and doing it well, maybe it will even make a great Christmas present or you could sell it via your website.
35. Plan a calendar for 2019 and go out and shoot a every month to make it date specific.
36. Try and create one image you are proud of every week and start building a summary of the year containing those images now. Publish it on 31st December 2018.
37. Team up with a makeup artist and plan some regular shoots with each other throughout the year.
38. If you don’t have an Instagram account, create one.
39. If you do have an Instagram account then try and double your followers during the year. The more you post the more followers you’ll get. The more people you follow the more likely they are to follow you back.
40. Develop a photographic style.
41. If you have some equipment you really like then write a blog post about it.
42. Interview a photographer.
43. Photograph some art and the artists that create it.
44. Write a blog post about a shoot you have done.
45. Dig deep into some aspect of the equipment you use and write a blog post about it.
46. Develop a photographic workflow for your image management.  Here’s one to try.
47. Capture your learnings in blog posts.  It acts as a document for you to go back and read as well as something others can learn from.
48. Design a logo for your blog/website/business cards.
49. Create some business cards.  I use moo.com who provide a great range of sizes and options.
50. Be inspired by some photographic quotations.
51. Review some of your old images. You may be pleasantly surprised at what you find. Maybe you’ll re-edit some of what you already processed or find some unpublished gems.
52. Remember that at the end of the day photography is all about the four C’s (creativity, consistency, communication and craftsmanship).

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