The 2 biggest hurdles I face as a photographer. I can buy a ton of gear, I can edit the crap out of pictures, I can even give truthful and (hopefully) helpful critiques. But the things I struggle most with as a photographer are motivation and inspiration.
It's been months now since I last picked up my camera, I had 3 weeks off work over the Christmas/New Years period and kept telling myself I was going to jump in the ute, go for a drive and take some amazing pictures.... you know, tomorrow.
Anyway I've finally decided to do something about it, and that's add a new page to my site. It's called "1 A Week". Now some photographers take on a popular project called the 365 Day project where they take and post a photo every day for a year. I'm going to start off small and start it's baby brother project the "52 week challenge." The plan being that I will take, edit and post 1 picture on that page every week.
Now don't expect it to be my best work, in fact it's probably going to end up with a ton of self portraits as I quickly run out of ideas. But I hope to post some good content on there as it falls out of my head. I will also draw inspiration and recreate other shots I've seen online as I have with my first weeks entry.
I completely stole this idea from a photography forum, but it just just goes to show you can make some really interesting shots with minimal setup.
This is simply a bowl on M&M's sitting on the floor with 2 cans either side the bowl. Resting on those cans is a sheet of glass which I wiped down with RainX. Now RainX is a liquid you normally put on the windscreen of your car to make water run off much easier. I guess it's hydrophobic. That means when you spray water on the glass it beads up and you get essentially hundreds of little fish eye lenses.
Then fire a flash onto the bowl to illuminate the M&M's and you get the effect above. It helps if you have a macro lens as that lets you get really close and magnify all the droplets.
A pillow is great when you have old man knees like me, but that really is all you need, and I think the results are pretty cool.
The only problem now is that I have this big bag of M&M's that I've finished photographing. Now what to do with them, what to do...