 Think back to when you were first given a camera. You were past this magical box and you held it up to your eye and you turned to the person who'd given it to you and you asked the age old question, what should I photograph? It is a question that was probably confounding you then and it's probably confounding you now. Fortunately, there is a answer to this conundrum. How's it, how's it? There is, I think that a fairly obvious thing about asking this question is that we are not sure about what to do with something that is new. So we turn to people who have more experience with whatever it is that we're using, in this case it's a camera. And I think fairly naturally we say to somebody, okay, what am I supposed to do? Just as much when you learn any other thing you say to somebody, how do I drive the car? Or how do I use the chainsaw? Things of that nature. And the problem with this is that those are all very mechanical things. But with photography because it is a visual art form that beyond the technical, this is how you switch camera and stuff, that everything is very open to interpretation. And to really the phrase that you should be asking, and I'm sorry to use the word should there because I don't like it, but the phrase that we really want to be asking is what do I want to photograph? What do I want to photograph? Not do what do you think I should photograph? Because the two are not the same thing. How do we answer this problem? What should we photograph? There are a number of ways to go about it. And one in this day and age would be to Google what should I photograph? And that will give you a nice kind of very compact, neat list of something that somebody else has decided that you should photograph. So that's kind of okay, but it's not really addressing the real issue. Because once you've worked your way through that list, you're kind of like, well, what should I photograph now? So how do you go about getting rid of these issues? Well, the first thing that you really want to start doing is to stop thinking of yourself as a specific kind of photographer. If you are like me, right? And I think most photographers are, pretty soon after you picked up a camera, you decided to label yourself. The same probably goes true for a lot of you. You may be into street, or you may define yourself as being a landscape photographer. So all these labels have restricted what you think is suitable material for a subject. So as soon as you take this label off of you, as soon as you stop thinking yourself as a still life photographer, just merely a photographer who was interested in all of the stuff around us, then the options for you to photograph are so opened up. They just become absolutely infinite because everything can be interpreted in a different way. And that's the beauty of photography is that your vision, the way that you see the world is what we're looking to do here. Not for you to replicate photographs that somebody else has told you you should do this. I'm gonna share with you a piece of practical advice about how you can start seeing the options, seeing the possibilities in subjects all around you. And I mentioned earlier that you need to photograph things that interest you. So for this exercise, you really do need to be interested in this. I would like you to take an object, right? So it could be just this simple camera that we have here and photograph it in 36 unique ways. It's gonna say unique and different, but you know what I mean, right? That is one of the best exercises you can do is because you're gonna train your eye to see an object for all the potential that it has. Now the first couple of images are gonna be fairly simple because you can run around, take some things, but then it's gonna get harder and harder. And that's the point, right? If all of these photographs are easy, and this is why I say 36 exposures rather than just like five, that you are training yourself. It's a bit like doing physical exercise. Five press ups is no big deal, but 15, 20, 100, depending on your abilities, it's those last few that really make the difference. And it's the same with the photography. When you start challenging the things that are holding your back and you're pushing against them, then you can start seeing that you can see things so different. If you just have exercised yourself, if you trained your eye to see the wonder that's in all these images. So try that out the next time that you have, you know, an hour or so spare, take an object that interests you, photograph it in 36 different ways, different, completely different ways, and see what you can come up with. See what potential you can untap. And I know that you'll be surprised about how much potential you can actually untap in what could be considered just a simply mundane object. If there are things that you are desperate to photograph, then photograph them. It doesn't matter if you think there are things you should photograph. Just go with your instinct. Harry Callaghan, who is a very famous photographer, not a cop in San Francisco, would photograph anything that caught his eye. Now he used a term for this. He called them clues, photographic clues, because he would photograph them and see what came from them. Not for any specific purpose, but just because something about it intrigued him. And this is best illustrated in this photograph of a flower head or like a weed or something. Now he photographed that and was interested in its shape and its form. He was also embarked, or he was embarking on a 10-year project, a photographing Eleanor, who, and it's a very famous series of photographs. And he photographed her in masses of different ways, right? And you see that there's an overlap between these two photographs. And that would never have happened if Harry Callaghan had said, I am photographing a person, so I need to photograph them in a way that makes sense for being a person. I am a people photographer, so I'm gonna just photograph people things. He looked beyond what was accepted. And I want you to do the same thing as well. Look for those clues. See where they are hiding, because they hide in plain sight. They're chicksy little things. And if you are not open to seeing them, if you're not open to exploring their possibilities, then you will miss out on them. Please don't miss out on them. I thought it would be handy. I thought it would be really good to look at and doing this exercise. I thought it would be really interesting for me rather than just tell you about this exercise to do it myself. And I'm extremely glad that I did because it was actually quite hard going, but extremely rewarding. And initially, as I mentioned, the first five or six were fairly easy to produce and there wasn't too many issues there. But when I got to around about frame 20, that's where we started getting tricky and I was beginning to run out of ideas. These are the sequences that I was going through. So this is the first shot and that's the second shot and that's the third and so on. Now you can see I'm sort of playing with apertures here and these are all straight out of camera, right? So I haven't done anything to these because that's not the point of this exercise. You could, of course, if you wish, use different ways of processing an image to change things up, but I prefer to just kind of work on what I had available to me in camera and here you can see I'm playing with some exposures, trying some different things out. Now these are not the world's greatest photographs by any means or stretch of the imagination, but think of these as a warm-up exercise. Obviously, the more confident and capable you become of experimenting with various ideas, then these photographs can be more considered, if you will. This is just a good quick example. I like to use the very quick and dirty of me just testing things out. Like here's dropping the lime into the fruit bowl and then there's the lime smacked into the fruit bowl. What I found from this was that I really had to kind of start thinking quite outside my comfort zone for what could be considered to be something new to try. I'm extremely glad that I went outside because this particular photograph here, which I think is absolutely wonderful. I love the cut, not the colors, but the way that the patterns are created by the spinning of the wire in there. It's just absolutely beautiful. Some of these obviously didn't work and some of them, like the spinning one that I talked about, I really enjoy. But that's the whole point of this. It's just to try things out, to see what is out there. And you could do this with anything. Even you could do this even with a person or a landscape or whatever that you wanted to. So go off and shoot these photographs. Go and try this exercise for yourself. If you're interested, I will put a link to this contact sheet in the description box below so you can go download it and have a look for yourself. It doesn't matter if you picked up a camera 10 minutes ago or if you picked up a camera 10 years ago. If you're an amateur or if you're a professional, the question that you should be asking yourself every time you trip the shutter is who is this photograph for? Is it for somebody else or is it for you? Is this what you want to photograph or is it what you think that you should be photographing? If you are looking to learn more about how to express yourselves through your photography, then I would highly recommend that you check out this video here because that will give you a really great insight into expressing yourself with more freedom. Anyway, thanks for watching and I'll see you again soon.