This 52 Week Challenge will Improve Your Photography Skills in 2018

If you’re looking to improve your photography skills in 2018, doing a year-long photo challenge is a great way to stay motivated with ideas and inspiration. Photographer Dale Foshe has put together a new 52 week photography challenge for 2018.

You’ll receive a specific photo challenge every Monday in each of the 52 weeks of the year. The challenges will each be from one of five categories:

1. Vision: This category is designed to push you to go beyond sight, to insight; to take inspiration and make it a reality. Developing a Vision for your work is showing to others what you see in your mind’s eye.

2. Composition: Composition refers to the way the various elements in a scene are arranged within the frame. Challenges will focus on setting up the shot and developing our personal composition styles; styles which can become our trademark.

3. Technical: Technical Aptitude is just as important as creative inspiration in photography. This year’s technical category is primarily focused on in-camera processes, however, there will be some post-processing techniques included.

4. Creative: When this category comes up, you really have room to express yourself. You can interpret the assignment literally or figuratively. Unlike the other categories, the idea of this category is to let your artistic impression shine.

5. Wild Card: Consider this a Show-and-Tell for grown-ups. You have freedom do shoot what and how you wish. Let us know if you’re trying a new technique, composition, style, subject, working on a specific project, or just exercising your freedom.

Here’s a downloadable PDF with the full list of 52 challenges — print it out and reference it each week:

Want to add this challenge to your online calendar to have it remind you of your challenge each week? Here’s the calendar link you can add to your favorite calendar service.

Once you’ve created a photo for each challenge, you can join the challenge’s Facebook group to share your work and be inspired by other photographers. You can also post and browse on social media under the hashtags: #dogwood52, #dogwood2018, and #dogwoodweek[NUMBER] (ex: #dogwoodweek1, #dogwoodweek2).

Foshe launched his first 52 Week Challenge in 2015 and followed it up with another one in 2016. Both were huge successes: tens of thousands of photographers around the world participated. With this third upcoming iteration in 2018, this challenge is becoming a popular New Year’s resolution for photographers who want to keep their creative juices flowing.

Discussion