Weekly Challenges

As part of the HND course I am currently on, we have been set weekly challenges. Although not strictly professional work I would like to talk about the challenges as I believe there are a fair amount of lessons to be learnt.

All work aside, the challenges have been very interesting and sometimes difficult to interpret. I have done a small amount of research and have found a number of posts, images, websites and pages that offer daily or weekly challenges. Searching on a site called pinterest, I have found an abundance of 'pins' that offer daily photographic or artistic challenges, these daily tasks could be taken as weekly tasks.

Being a photographer, I find it very difficult to get inspiration and motivation; I also rarely experiment with new ideas, mostly, because I just cannot think of them. Engaging in weekly challenges, and sticking it through regardless of the outcome, is a great way to keep you on your toes. The challenges both test, and inspire your creative skills, and give you new thing to be working on.

Keeping the camera in use is one of the hardest things for photographers without consistent work, budding photographers will often go weeks or months without picking up the camera, this is something that can hep that, whether you are an experienced professional or a beginner, experimenting with new ideas will offer creative growth, and satisfaction upon completion.

The challenges I have/will have been set are all based on digital manipulation, sometime I have always struggled with. Although initially I hated the idea of engaging in weekly Photoshop tasks, the challenges have pushed me into uncomfortable areas of photography that I would usually avoid, forcing creative growth. The true lesson is, one will never know what they are truly capable of if they spend their time in comfort.

How did your comfort area become so comfortable anyway? Practice? Determination?

In my experience, mostly luck and leaps of faith, if you want to do something, just try it. Another point is the old saying; don't knock it until you try it. This is very true, I hated most forms of still life photography, but having been forced to shoot it due to HND projects, I have found that there are many things I am not only capable of doing, but actually enjoy doing as well.

If you have the facilities to enrol on a photography course, even an evening class, I would highly recommend it, any kind of predetermined criteria that you have to follow, may be restringing during the course, but the lessons learned are valuable, and you would be surprised how techniques used in one area of photography can be applied to other, contrasting areas.

The point I am getting at is don't be lazy, photography may be an art form, maybe even an escape for some, but if you don't push yourself, and stay within comfortable practice, you will not grow or develop as an artist, and it will not be long before you grow bored of the same thing.

The weekly challenges will soon follow as I blog about each one, how and why I did them, and talk through the techniques/post-processing I used. 

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