Your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to create an image incorporating a park bench. That’s right…a park bench. A plain old, run-of-the-mill, common, everyday…park bench.

It might sound boring at first, but taking pictures of park benches can lead to some really cool images.

When you head out to a neighborhood park with your camera, you’ll probably notice that most of the benches in the park are all the same style. But go to a second park, and you just might find something completely different. Different parks are designed at different times by different architects & landscape designers, so from park to park, you will often end up with a dazzling array of styles & variations in the benches.

So there’s variety in the benches themselves, and then there’s how you choose to put your own interpretation on this challenge. Do you just point your camera at a bench & go “click”? (I hope not.)

Perhaps you’ll take one image and put a little “Andy Warhol” spin on the image:

Or maybe you’ll find an interesting bench and a willing subject to pose for you:

Whatever approach you choose to take with this week’s challenge, I hope you’ll have fun looking at those boring old park benches with a fresh photographer’s eye.

Your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to create an image based on, or which incorporates curved lines.

We live our lives in environments filled with straight lines. Our houses are made up of lines and angles. Streets tend to go straight for as long as they can. The text you’re reading right now is neatly aligned in straight lines on a screen bounded by four straight lines. Straight lines are all around us.

But if you make a conscious effort to stop seeing all those straight lines for just a moment, you’ll find a world of curves out there, too.

Your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to get outside & go for a walk with your camera.

That’s it, really. Just get out & go for a walk. See what you can see, and take pictures along the way. Then go back home and see what caught your eye while you were out & about.

The great thing about this kind of exercise is, you can do it just about anywhere. Are the trees starting to bud in your area? Cool. Take some tree pictures, then. Do you live in the mountains? Or near a dramatic body of water? Great.

But what if you live somewhere you’re surrounded by boring fields, or just a plain old average, everyday suburban neighborhood? Doesn’t matter. Take your camera with you, use your photographer’s eye, and you’ll come back with something amazing.

Now go put your shoes on, grab your camera, and get out there.

Last week I asked you to look out to the distance & work on creating images with straight, evenly aligned horizon lines. This week we’re going to focus a little closer to home and turn your attention to pets.

Working with animals can complicate everything about your photography. Animals usually aren’t very good at understanding your artistic vision and cooperating to get just the right pose. They’re typically more interested in the treats you hold in front of them in a desperate attempt to get them somewhat close to the image you’ve envisioned in your mind. And may God help you if you’re working with a cat and try gesturing “over there” with a laser pointer!

Do your best to create the image you want in-camera, but remember that post-processing with Photoshop, Gimp, or another photo editing app is always an option!

Last week’s challenge had you working on black & white landscape photography. I hope you came away from that with an image or two you’re pleased with. This week, I’d like you to take another look at those images. Did any of them just a little…off to you, but maybe you weren’t sure why?

Try taking a closer look at the horizon line in your photos. An off-kilter horizon, or just lines in your composition that are slightly misaligned, can ruin an otherwise great photo. Think about the trouble you’ll go to in your house to straighten a picture frame…and how absolutely annoying it can be when the photo gets bumped ever so slightly out of alignment. The same thing goes when you’re composing your photos.

Consider the following examples:

In each set of images, the photo on the right probably seems a little better. The water in the first image of the fishing boat on the pond slopes from the upper left down & to the right. Your brain intuitively knows that ponds don’t behave that way, so the image just doesn’t feel right.

The first farmhouse image has been rotated just a little counter-clockwise. It’s not a bad image, in & of itself, but it feels just a little unbalanced. The rotated image almost works, except for the grain silo. Just like the pond in the first set of images, your brain knows that with the notable exception of certain towers in Italy, buildings are supposed to be straight up & down, so the image on the right ends up just feeling better.

Now, all of this is not to say that every horizon line in every landscape photo should be perfectly aligned and absolutely horizontal. Images with hills or mountain ranges might not cooperate for a perfectly straight & level horizon. And there may be times when you want to create an off-balance or off-kilter image for artistic reasons.

But your assignment this week, should you choose to accept it, is to be mindful of the horizon in your landscape images and create an intentionally straight, level, and balanced horizon image.

Welcome back to another week of photography!

While the calendar says we’ve made it to spring, the weather and the landscape haven’t really come around to the idea just yet. Here in South Dakota the birds have returned, (but I still haven’t managed my cardinal picture), the weather has teased a few days of warmer temperatures, (but we’re now expecting snow again by the middle of the week), and the trees are still frustratingly bare (but there are a few brave early buds out there).

This week while you wait for things to warm up and springtime color to catch up with the calendar, I want you to try your hand at black & white landscape photography.

By removing the “distraction” of color, black & white photography opens up a new way of looking at the landscape. Instead of seeing green trees, blue skies, and yellow flowers, when you shoot in black & white, (or for black & white, if you plan to convert color images to black & white later), you can focus on the contrast between light & dark, the shapes and contours in your subject

Your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to get outside and create a landscape image in black & white. Broad & sweeping or close & intimate, either way is fine. Just get outside and try to see the landscape around you with your photographer’s eye.

Here in South Dakota it looks like we’ve finally made it to spring! The weather is warming up, the ice is melting, and…the birds have returned! If your yard is anything like ours, there’s probably a bird or two flitting about somewhere. That’s why this week, the challenge is all about creating an image of or about birds.

Now, just grabbing your camera and snapping a quick shot of a bird in the backyard is sometime easier said than done. We have a pair of northern cardinals that’s taken up residence in our yard, but unfortunately, they’re both very camera shy, and every image I’ve come up with so far has ended up looking like this:

Photographing birds can be one of the toughest things you may ever try as a photographer. You may come up with a great big zero ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but it’s that one image you’re going for anyway. So don’t let the near misses and blurred wings stop you from getting out there and trying!

If you’re among the younger set of Weekly Photo Challenge participants, this week’s challenge title and the image above might not mean too much to you. But if you were around “back in the day” (the 1990s, in this case), Jerry Maguire desperately screaming “Show me the money!” into the phone probably rings a bell or two.

But this week’s challenge isn’t really about Jerry Maguire. The idea this week is to create an image of money. I want you, literally, to show me the money.

Money is another common object, something you have the potential to see every day. It’s so common that it is easy to take it for granted, not to see the details, shapes, and colors involved. But if you look closely, and really try to see the money around you with a photographer’s eye, there are creative image possibilities galore.

So your challenge this week, should you choose to accept it, is to get up close with a little bit of money to see what kind of artistic image you can create of money, or that includes money, or that implies the presence of money.

Time, time, time See what's become of me
While I looked around for my possibilities
I was so hard to please
But look around Leaves are brown
And the sky is a hazy shade of winter
--Paul Simon

Those are the opening lines from “A Hazy Shade of Winter” by Simon & Garfunkel. And while we’ve almost made it to springtime, we’re not quite there yet. As I sit down to write this week’s challenge, the yard outside has turned white with a light snow, the trees are still bare, and the sky (or what I can see of it, anyway) is definitely an overcast, hazy shade of winter.

As a photographer, it can be difficult to find inspiration in the sometimes bleak color palette that winter brings. But this week, that’s exactly what I want you to do. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to create an image that doesn’t rely on bright colors or high dynamic range. Try instead to focus on whites, blacks, grays & browns, and see where that leads you.

While the images above are definitely processed in black & white, that’s not the only way to focus in on muted colors. Winter weather and the lighting it provides can lead you to interesting muted color palette images just by focusing in on scenes and objects around you.

It really doesn’t matter too much what you decide to use for your images this week, so long as you get out there with your camera and find something. The point is to keep shooting, even when the weather’s cold and the sky is gray.

Because springtime really is just around the corner.

Have fun!

In a weekly challenge post last year, we looked at cropping your photos to extreme aspect ratios, creating either really, really wide , or tall & skinny images. This week, we’ll go to the other end of the spectrum. Your assignment this week, should you choose to accept it, is to create an image cropped to a square (1:1) aspect ratio.

You might be thinking, “Square crop. That’s easy. So where’s the challenge?” And on the surface, this is a fairly simple challenge, technically speaking. Just about every photo editing app out there lets you crop your images, and I’d be surprised if you found one that doesn’t include a square/1:1 crop option.

But there’s much more to this challenge than just snapping a pic and applying a square crop. Your job as a photographer is to make your images interesting, to create an image where every aspect of the photo (pun intended) works together to catch your viewer’s eye, to make your audience stop & think.

Whatever you decide to do with your square-cropped images this week, just be sure to have fun with it!