The 15-Hour Photographer
| Deadline: February 5th, 2007 |
Charge up your camera, load it with at least a 1GB card (or have seven or more rolls of 36-exposure film on hand), and be prepared to shoot, shoot, shoot.
Your assignment is to take at least one picture every five minutes during the day. You get eight hours off for sleep, and another hour for…well, stuff you wouldn’t want to involve photography. That’s a minimum of 225 photos.
Your subjects are all up to you. This is to become a better photographer, not just a photo opportunist. That is, you don’t want to be someone who only gets a photo when a postcard-style setting presents itself.
We improve as photographers by forcing ourselves to shoot; by finding the photograph when there doesn’t seem to be one; by studying the light — every kind of light we encounter — and seeing the photo potential in it. Capturing a great image of Angelina Jolie under a softbox is easy. But how about that candy wrapper in the gutter? Or that group of friends posing under a mixture of natural, incandescent, and fluorescent light? Can you still make an outstanding photo when the subject and conditions aren’t perfect?
The time pressure, not to mention the pressure to make as many of the 225-plus photos as good as possible, will be intense. Maddeningly so, I suspect.
Pop Photo wants to see your amazing images from International Shooting-All-The-Time Day. E-mail your five best to Shooting@PopPhoto.com. Send them as JPEGs — 72 dpi is fine — with your name, address, and phone number. If you have a story to tell from your day, send it with the JPEGs. We’ll post images and anecdotes on PopPhoto.com.
If improving your photography skills, having a day of grueling, creative fun, and web-wide fame aren’t enough, how about the chance to win a prize?
Of those who e-mail us five images from their day, we’ll draw one winner, who will receive a Pentax K100D. This DSLR packs 6.1MP and sensor-based image-stabilization. It comes with two Pentax lenses (an f/3.5-5.6 18-55mm and an f/4-5.6 50-200mm) and a 4GB SanDisk Ultra II SD card.
www.popphoto.com/popularphotographyfeatures/3561/editorial-the-15-hour-photographer.html
