Taking the ‘One Word’ Photography Challenge

Finding the motivation to go out with your camera can be challenging. Poor weather, a busy schedule, the difficulty of leaving the house, or uncertainty about what to photograph are common obstacles. However, we all know that when we do make the effort to venture out with our camera, we rarely regret it.

So, how can you increase your motivation and get out more often to do photography?

A recent video by UK-based photographer Andrew Banner, Nothing To Photograph? Just ONE WORD Will Change That, offers practical suggestions to help motivate us to head out with our cameras and highlights the significant benefits of doing so.

Andrew Banner bases his advice on a challenge he undertook to photograph using the word ‘bleak’ as the theme of his work. He discovered that, even though his image wasn’t short-listed in the challenge, he still reaped the benefits of getting out taking pictures.

For Andrew, the essence of the challenge was to experience being challenged, to have a purpose for his photography session, to think creatively, and, at the very least, to have a reason to go out and take photos.

In the video, Andrew mentions one of the most frequent challenges photographers face: deciding what to photograph.

This is something that resonates with me. I am often faced with this obstacle. and I end up going to a location and taking photos of anything that catches my eye. But without some focus for my photography the results can often be disappointing. Andrew Banner offers a solution to this dilemma.

A word.

He suggests that we just pick a word – even something random from a book – and use that word as our photography theme. ‘Direction’ is the word he chooses and he gives a range of options for using this one word in our photography – leading lines, street signs, roads running off into the distance, people walking in one direction, traffic, perspective – the list is endless.

I took the word 'direction' and looked through some of my recent images for examples of its use. I could have shown many more examples so it is a word that has great potential for image making wherever you are.

Each of the images above represents an interpretation of the word 'direction'.

Andrew Banner concludes his video by saying,

Having even the slimmest of concepts of what you’re looking for will help you determine where you go and what you might find when you get there.

Most of the time our own thoughts are the biggest limitations.

You can check out Andrew Banner's video here.

I hope it gives you some motivation for those times when you find it difficult to get out with your camera, especially when you don’t know what to photograph.