SEEING THE EVERYDAY provides a comprehensive collection of creative exercises and technical tutorials designed to help novice, or practiced, cell (mobile) phone photographers overcome artistic ruts and enhance their skills.
The material suggest practical “jump-starts”, such as shooting with a single focal length, limiting shot counts, or capturing two dozen unique images from one fixed spot. Beyond creative prompts, the guide offers technical mastery of manual settings, including depth of field, shutter speed, and white balance, specifically for smartphone users. Many articles highlight mobile photography, recommending the app Snapseed for post-processing and advocating for “mini-seeing projects” to improve observation.
Various challenges, ranging from 30-day prompts to specific “abstract” assignments, encourage artists to find beauty in mundane subjects like textures, light, and everyday objects. Ultimately, the sources emphasise that engaging the creative eye is more vital than owning expensive equipment.
But in the meantime if you want some ideas you can try when you only have a limited time, here are some suggestions:
- Take street portraits in your neighborhood to take advantage of the midday hustle and bustle.
- You could even shoot at the same point at or around the same time, just to see how the scene changes.
Or, If you are looking for structured, quick tasks you can complete in 30 minutes or less, try these :
- Let’s get the hardest out of the way first :
Collaborate with a stranger: Find someone interesting outside and ask if you can take their portrait. If they agree, you can ask for their email to send them the final photo. - Stand in one spot: Plant your feet in an interesting location and challenge yourself to take 10 to 24 unique photographs without moving your feet. You can turn around, bend down, go on your tiptoes, or adjust your camera settings, but you cannot step forward, backward, left, or right.
- Play the lottery: Write down random photo subjects or concepts (like a cup of coffee, the color red, or shadow play) on scraps of paper. Draw one from a box on your lunch break and make that your photographic mission.
- Mini-seeing projects: Pick a highly specific, ordinary subject—like yellow cars, torn posters, or discarded gloves—and take a picture every time you encounter it during your walk.
- Count to five: Keep an eye out for everyday details to create a series of photographs representing the numbers one through five (for example, a single pear, two cats, a line of three trees, etc.).
- Ten of One: Pick a small, common object (like a coffee mug or a fork) and take 10 to 12 unique or abstract photographs of it.
- The Nine-Angle Challenge: Pick a single subject and force yourself to shoot it from at least nine different angles, such as on its level, from directly above, or looking upward from below.
- Listen to music: Put your music library on shuffle and use whatever song starts playing as inspiration to illustrate how the song makes you feel or to capture an object mentioned in the lyrics.
But, at all times, REMEMBER it is meant to be FUN, an easy way of learning to get the most out of your cell (mobile) phone