5 Photography Challenges to Master Your Smartphone’s Camera
Unleash your creative potential and sharpen your photographic eye with these five challenges designed exclusively for your smartphone. Ditching your normal camera in favour of the camera in your pocket can help force you to focus on the fundamentals of photography – composition, light, and storytelling – turning limitations into a source of inspiration.
Here are 5 challenges to push your mobile photography skills to the next level:
1. The “Golden Hour & Blue Hour” Challenge
Restrict your photography to the ‘golden hours’ – the first hour after sunrise and the last hour before sunset – and the ‘blue hours,’ the period shortly before sunrise and after sunset. This challenge should force you to work with specific and often dramatic natural lighting conditions. The warm, soft light of the golden hour is ideal for flattering portraits and creating a serene atmosphere, while the deep, cool tones of the blue hour can produce striking, moody cityscapes and landscapes. This exercise will teach you to observe and anticipate the changing quality of light.
2. The “Single-Point Focus” Composition Challenge
Choose a single, small subject and build your entire composition around it. This could be a solitary flower, a colourful piece of street art, or an interesting shadow. The goal is to use leading lines, framing, negative space, and other composition tools to draw the viewer’s eye directly to that single point of interest. This challenge should help hone your compositional skills, forcing you to think deliberately about every element within your frame and its relationship to your chosen subject.
3. The “Monochrome World” Challenge
Switch your phone’s camera to its black and white mode and keep it there for a full week. By removing colour, you are compelled to see the world in terms of shapes, textures, contrast, and light. This challenge is a powerful way to improve your understanding of composition and how light and shadow play off one another to create depth and emotion. Look for strong graphic elements, repeating patterns, and dramatic tonal ranges.
4. The “Forced Perspective” Challenge
Get playful with perception by creating illusions of scale and distance. This challenge encourages you to interact with your environment in a new way, looking for opportunities to make distant objects appear small enough to hold in your hand or to make everyday objects seem monumental. Successful forced perspective shots require careful alignment and a good understanding of depth, forcing you to experiment with different angles and distances from your subjects.
5. The “In-Camera Only” Editing Challenge
For this challenge, all your edits must be made using only the native editing tools within your phone’s camera app or gallery. This means no third-party editing apps like Lightroom or Snapseed.
This limitation should force you to get the best possible shot “in-camera” and to fully explore the capabilities and limitations of your phone’s built-in software. You’ll be surprised at the power hidden within the standard cropping, exposure, and colour adjustment tools, leading to a more streamlined and efficient workflow.