7 Photo Challenges for Photographers Who Are Stuck at Home

Jared Polin, AKA Fro Knows Photo, has published a set of 7 photo challenges that photographers can do while stuck at home. It’s his way of helping to keep photographers sane and creative while they #stayathome and self-isolate.

The photo challenges that Polin came up with range from the expected ideas like ‘self-portraits’ and ‘macro,’ to some truly creative and interesting exercises like his ‘movie challenge’ and ‘don’t move challenge.’ Here’s a quick summary of all seven challenges:

1. Self-Portrait Challenge: The theme is “in your space,” so capture a shot that captures you and whatever space in your house best represents you.
2. Close Focus/Macro Challenge: If you have a macro lens, use that. If not, try taking close focus pictures with the best lens at your disposal.
3. Movie Challenge: Put on a great classic movie and watch it with your camera and a 50mm (or similar) lens in hand. Practice capturing the best compositions as they happen in real time.
4. Wide Open/Closed Down Challenge: Practice shooting with your lens at its most wide open, and its most closed down. This will give you a better sense of DOF, while also forcing you to compensate with the rest of your settings.
5. Reflection Challenge: Find/create and photograph a reflection. It doesn’t have to be a self-portrait, but it certainly can be.
6. Don’t Move Challenge: Sit down somewhere, preferably a balcony or porch or park (while maintaining social distance) and don’t move for 30 minutes. Try to find/capture as many different compositions as you can from this one, locked down location.
7. Landscape Challenge: this one is limited to your backyard or in your local park while keeping at least 6 feet away from others, but it’s a great excuse to get outside and feel less cooped up, without putting yourself or anybody else in danger.

Check out the full video up top to hear more about all of these challenges and why Polin chose them. And if you do decide to play along, Fro is asking participants to submit their best results to bit.ly/frochallenge01, while following these guidelines:

Submit only full res exported JPEG files or if you shoot in JPEG, the full res version. Please rename your files as follows Assignment#_last_first_00. If it’s more than one filer that assignment make it 02 03 so on so forth. Example: 01_Polin_Jared_01 is assignment 01, my name, and one file.

Finally, if you’re a beginner who’s just learning how to use your camera, check out this video where Polin is giving away his 3-hour “Guide to Getting Out of Auto” for free; it’s a great resource for newbies and he tells us that he’s now given away over $1,000,000 worth of the video guide.