Photography Exercises

Exercise #1: Getting to Know Your Lenses

Find a favorite subject (person, tree, tower, whatever). Get far enough away from it so that there is a lot of "empty space" on all sides of it. Top, Bottom, Left and Right. Take a picture. Every 5 paces forward, snap another. Do this until you're so close you can no longer focus on the subject. Now do the same thing on your knees. Then your belly. If you do this with all your lenses, repeatedly, you will integrate the vision of your lenses into your mind's eye. Fewer than 10% of photographers have this skill!

Exercise #2: Boot's Eye View

Spend some time on your belly looking at the world through other people's feet. In essence this is really just a wacky environmental portrait exercise. Imagine the security guard's polished black shoes and the ballpark behind, or a child's feet at the ocean's edge.

Exercise #3: Foreground/Background Connection

When you get comfortable with how your lenses see, begin to imagine pictures with foreground and background subjects that interact with eachother somehow. Just remember that an "interaction" does not always have to be obvious or straight forward. How about a whiskey bottle or syringe with an alley as a background? Or an urgent memo on a desk with hands furiously typing away in the background. What other stories can you think of?