 How's it? How's it? Welcome back to Five Minute Photo School. Today the question that you should be asking as a photographer. As young photo students we were confronted with a whole bunch of new things we needed to ask, not just about the how to develop film but also technical questions. We were asking, you know, what sort of lens did this person use? What sort of aperture? How do we do this? How do we do that? And technical questions are all well and good because of course you need to master those mechanical processes of taking a photograph but they will only get you so far in developing your aesthetic voice. The questions that you should be asking yourself are why and what if? When you ask these questions of a photograph then you strip away the veneer of technical that often lies on top of things and it seems obscured the true heart of a photograph and we see the possibilities being laid bare in front of us. At my heart I love taking photographs of people and this is a great example that when you look at these pictures by Martin Shuler and, you know, Dan Winters, Mark Selinger, there are technical questions that one could ask, you know, what lens is and about the lighting and stuff, but the question, why? Why did you shoot it like this? Why did you choose that lens? Why did you decide that this would be a good way to approach photographing this person? Is getting far more into in tune with how a photographer constructs an image? How we become used to using our photographic eye to see the world differently? As your homework for this week I'd love for you to first of all go back through all of your images that you found last time. You remember when you sifted through them and you got them into an order of your vision and think about questioning what if and why. Why could you change that up or what happens if you try a different approach? See the avenues that are open to you and then go outside, go somewhere, spend five minutes photographing one thing in a way that is completely different each time. When you apply this to your own images then you enter the realm of experimentation which is awesome because you are pushing yourself out of the obvious, out of what you think you should be doing. Ask yourself why don't I try this? What happens if I stand over there? What happens if I jump up and down? All these questions that you can use as prompts to take your photography in a way that you had not expected. Now of course this brings up the specter of mistakes and nobody likes a mistake but if you think that making a mistake is somehow detrimental to your photography that it is something bad then you are missing a trick, that you are depriving yourself of such a rich resource that goes untapped into helping you grow and evolve as a photographer. To find out more about this huge mistake that most people actually make especially in the world of digital click on this video over here. Thank you ever so much for watching the five minute photo school.