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Most photography advice tells you what to do with your camera. Very little of it tells you what to point the camera at, which is the part beginners actually get stuck on. You learn the exposure triangle, you understand composition in theory, and then you stand in your living room with no idea what to shoot.
What follows is seven assignments. Each one has a constraint, because constraint is what forces you to look properly, and each one teaches something specific that reading about it will not.
The reason constraints work is unglamorous. Given unlimited choice, you photograph what you already know how to photograph, and you get better at nothing. Take most of the choice away, and you are pushed into territory you would never have wandered into voluntarily. Almost everything worth learning sits in that territory.
Do them in order if you like. Do one a week, and you will be a noticeably better photographer in two months.
1. Twenty photographs inside your own house
One location, twenty frames, all different. Nothing shot outside.
Your first half dozen will be the obvious ones — the rooms as you see them, furniture, whatever is out of the window. It's after that, when the easy pictures have run out, that anything starts happening. You notice a blind throwing stripes across a wall, or steam coming off a kettle, or what light does come through a glass of water on the table.
Use whatever settings you want. Just don't leave the house. That's the only rule, and it's doing all the work.
Where people go wrong is stopping at twelve. Twelve is where it gets uncomfortable and where most of the value is, so push through to twenty even if the last eight feel like scraping. Those eight are the ones you will look at afterward and wonder how you missed them for years.
2. The same person, seven days of light
Find someone willing to sit for you for five minutes a day. Partner, housemate, child, friend. Photograph them once a day for a week.
Keep them in roughly the same pose each day and change nothing except the light. One morning it's a window, the next an overcast afternoon, then a desk lamp after dark, then whatever a doorway gives you. You're not looking for good light, only different light.
Settings: put the camera in aperture priority and set f/4. Focus on the eye that's nearest you. Anything above 1/125 on the shutter will keep the frame sharp without you having to think about it, which is the point — the whole week is about watching light, and fiddling with settings will pull you out of that.
At the end of the week, put all seven side by side. The difference will surprise you, and it is entirely the light doing it.
Look specifically at what the light does to the eyes. Window light from the side puts a bright shape in them, and the face reads as alive. Overhead light leaves them in shadow, and the same person looks tired. Nobody tells beginners this, and once you have seen it across seven frames of one face, you will never stop noticing it.
3. Two hours in one place
Pick somewhere busy near you — a market, a station, a park bench, a café with a window. Stay for two hours. Photograph until someone looking at the results would understand what kind of place it is and what happens there.
Not a single shot. A set.
If photographing strangers makes you uncomfortable, start with details and wide shots and work inward. Hands, signage, the back of a queue. By the second hour you will be more comfortable than you expected, which is most of what Fearless Faces is about.
Two hours is also long enough for the place to change around you. The light moves, one crowd leaves, and another arrives; someone sets up a stall. Most photographers never stay anywhere long enough to see that happen, which is why their pictures of a place all look like they were taken in the same ten minutes.
4. One focal length for a month
Tape the zoom ring if you have to. Pick 35mm or 50mm and shoot nothing else for four weeks.
On a kit zoom, fix it at 35mm. On a 24–70mm, use 50mm. If you already own a prime, you are set — just leave it on the camera.
What happens is that you stop composing with the zoom and start composing with your feet, which is a better habit and one most photographers never build because they never have to.
You will also start seeing in that focal length. After three weeks, you will walk into a room and know, before lifting the camera, roughly what will fit in the frame. That is a real skill, and it only comes from restriction.
Week one is genuinely irritating. You'll keep wanting a focal length you no longer have access to, and some shots will get away from you because of it. That's fine. Every one of those misses is telling you something about what this lens can't do, and by the third week you'll have stopped bumping into those limits because you've learned to see around them.
5. Photograph the same thing at three times of day
Find something that stays put — a tree, a building, the corner of a street. Shoot it at first light, again in the middle of the day, and then in the half hour once the sun has gone. Same spot each time, same framing.
The half hour after sunset is the one people skip. Light levels drop fast, so you will need a tripod or a wall to brace against — shutter speeds head into the seconds, and the same thinking applies as in any long exposure work.
The midday frame is worth taking even though you already know it will be the weakest. Having the bad one next to the good ones is what makes the lesson stick. You can read a hundred times that midday light is unflattering, and it means nothing until you are looking at your own three frames and can see exactly what it flattened.
Most beginners photograph whenever they happen to be somewhere. This assignment shows you what you have been giving up by doing that.
6. Fifty frames of one color
Pick a color. Red is easiest to start with, partly because there is a lot of it about and partly because it holds up well in a photograph even when the light is poor.
A postbox, a jacket, a shop awning, a broken tail light, a fire door. Fifty frames, one color.
This does something odd to your eye. After about twenty minutes, you start seeing red everywhere, including in places you have walked past a thousand times. That heightened noticing is what photographers mean when they talk about seeing, and this is the fastest way to experience it deliberately.
There's a second thing going on here that the rules of composition tend to skip over. Put a small patch of strong color somewhere in a frame, and the eye will go straight to it, ahead of anything larger or brighter competing for attention. That's worth knowing because it cuts both ways — you can use it, or a stray red sign in the corner can quietly ruin an otherwise decent photograph while you're looking at the subject.
7. Ten frames only
Go out for an afternoon and allow yourself ten photographs. Not ten keepers — ten shutter actuations. When they are gone, you go home.
When taking a bad photograph cost you money, people thought before pressing the shutter. Digital took that away, and what replaced it was volume. But shooting four hundred frames and keeping six is a different skill from working out in advance whether something is worth photographing at all, and only one of those two transfers to anything.
Count out loud if it helps. Three exposures in and knowing you have seven left changes how carefully you look at the next thing in front of you.
You will find yourself walking around subjects, waiting, and putting the camera down. That is the assignment working.
Do this one last. It is the hardest, and it is the one that changes how you shoot permanently.
How to get something out of these
Finish them
An assignment abandoned at frame nine teaches nothing. The learning is in the part after you run out of obvious ideas, which is exactly the point where it stops being fun.
Look at the results properly.
Put the frames on a screen, not a phone. Sort them. Pick the three best and work out what those three have in common. That is more useful than shooting another assignment.
The comparison matters more than the individual picture. One good frame tells you very little, because it might have been luck. Three good frames with something in common tell you what you are actually getting better at.
Keep the failures
Delete nothing for the first six months. The frames that did not work are where the information is, and you cannot see the pattern in your own mistakes until you have a few hundred of them to look at.
Repeat the ones that hurt.
Whichever assignment you found most uncomfortable is the one to do again. Discomfort usually means you have found an actual gap. Working through those gaps deliberately, over months rather than weeks, is roughly how a photographic voice gets built.
Frequently asked questions
What should a beginner photograph?
Something with a constraint attached. Open-ended practice produces open-ended results. Give yourself a limit — one room, one color, one focal length, ten frames — and the limit will force the learning.
How long should a photography project take?
Somewhere between an afternoon and a month. You can finish the single-location project or the color one in a couple of hours. The focal-length month and the seven-day portrait work differently — they don't demand much on any given day, but they do demand that you keep turning up, which most people find harder.
Do I need good equipment for these?
No. Every assignment here works on a kit lens or a phone. The one-focal-length project is arguably easier on a cheap prime than an expensive zoom.
Should I shoot in manual mode?
Not for these. Aperture priority is enough, and it leaves your attention free for the thing each assignment is actually about. Manual is worth learning, but learning it at the same time as learning to see means doing neither properly.
How do I know if I am improving?
Put the first five frames of an assignment next to the last five. What you'll usually find is that the early ones were taken from wherever you happened to be standing, and the later ones came after you'd moved, or crouched, or stood there a while waiting for something. Whatever distance there is between those two sets is what you learned that day.
Which project should I start with?
The first one. Twenty photographs inside your house cost you nothing, need no planning, and teach the thing everything else depends on, which is looking properly at what is in front of you.
