Enhance Your Daily Photography with Simple Challenges

One simple challenge would be to photograph patterns created by the early morning sunshine.

If you are someone who likes to do daily photography, whether that is with a dedicated camera or your phone camera, you might at times find yourself wondering what to photograph. It could be that you are so familiar with your local area that you run out of ideas for anything interesting to photograph, or you are faced with many dull days without good light for photography, or it could even be that you just can’t see the photography potential around you.

That is when a simple challenge can give you a new impetus and can help you look at your daily photography in a new way.

For many of us, daily photography is about getting in the practice; it’s primarily about honing our composition skills, finding new subjects, learning about our camera and understanding light. It is not about perfection or even about getting great images, but if a daily photography practice is worth doing, we want to keep ourselves motivated, keep learning and keep enjoying our photography,

For me, taking a simple challenge on a photography outing can encourage me to see anew, to notice small details and to look at familiar subjects and scenes from different perspectives.

Simple challenges are exactly that – simple! They don’t take any prior planning, they simply require you to become more observant when out with your camera, to become more adventurous with your subjects and to think a little more creatively.

One of the first simple challenges I gave myself was to photograph the colour yellow.

Any colour will do for this challenge and the challenge can be repeated many times taking a different colour each time. It might not seem very interesting initially but as you get going you begin to want to find something outside of the usual, you want to photograph ordinary subjects from different perspectives, and you want to showcase just how many examples of each colour there are all around us.

Here are some of my sample images of the colour yellow.

Ideas for simple challenges are easy to find; they just need us to think creatively and not resist topics because they seem mundane or ordinary. Our task is to find the ordinary and try to present it in a remarkable way and doing that will give us many productive photography hours.

Some topics to consider are:

Road signs

Telephone boxes

Overhead wires

Vehicles

Road markings

Light patterns

Windows

Doors

Old buildings

Shapes

Basketball nets

Bridges

Sheds

Benches

The list is endless and once you get started you will think of many more ideas.

All these subjects are things that I can photograph within walking distance of my home on a daily walk. Some will require good light, but many of them will work by experimenting with perspective and different focal lengths.

Below are some more sample images to illustrate some of the above ideas.

Why not try a simple challenge for yourself.