Feeling Stuck? Consider the Prime Time Challenge
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A fixed focal length lens is just one way to do the Prime Time Challenge
Hi folks. Short one this week.
Have you ever felt like you have lost your photo mojo? Just nothing happening for you?
This presumes that you are still willing to go out and shoot, only that you don’t know what to do? The Prime Time Challenge is a highly constraining exercise that forces you to actively see and to move around to find compositions that work for you.
You aren’t trying to impress anyone except yourself. If your primary motivation is likes or whatever on social media, I cannot help you as I see that model as being more self-destructive than anything. However, if you are photographing with your own pleasure as your primary, this challenge can help.
Here’s the deal.
If you own prime lenses, put the one that you use the least on the camera. If you don’t and tend to zoom lenses, set the zoom to about halfway in the zoom range and then lock it there with some gaffer tape. You are restricted to a focal length that you rarely or never use.
Next you go and make shots. Does not matter where you shoot or even what you choose to shoot. The only other rules of the process are a single focal length for 100 images. No burst mode, no bracketing, one image per shutter press. Try different compositions, different camera to subject distances. You are now a photographer in the late nineteen forties with one camera and one lens for your work.
Cartier-Bresson shot with a 50mm for most all his career. Eisenstadt used a 35mm. When I do the exercise, I have to use a 50mm because it is a focal length that in regular shooting, I never use. Each of us has a few of these.
My dear friend Fernando just bought a super fast 135mm. I could never do this because in over 45 years, I have never liked what I got from this focal length. That wouid be another focal length that would be good for me to use in this exercise and since I would not buy one, I would set my 70-200 to 135 and gaffer tape it so it would not allow zooming and thereby changing the focal length.
It sounds hard, but this exercise is pretty amazing in terms of what it opens up for you. Constraint is a useful methodology to encourage outside thinking. Give it a try.
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I'm Ross Chevalier, thanks for reading, watching and listening and until next time, peace.
