ideas for practice?

i have been searching all morning for some good, themed, exercises to practice. i have read various tutorials from all over and none seem to be of interest.

just the basics, for now (auto-bracketing, DOF, low-light, motion blur, etc) so, i'll toss it out there.....

can YOU come up with some fun ones to try?

If you want to have some fun with it, look in the Competitions sub-section of Photo Sharing section. They come up with some interesting challenges which may stimulate your creative pulses!

You can find it here:

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/forumdis​play.php?f=39

i plan on hitting some of those, but i think i am looking for something aimed at practicing techniques. i think thats where i lack the most right now.

I need to implement this more myself but I always thought of jotting down a little of all the different things I need to work on, then use a day to ONLY do that one thing.

Go to a park and ONLY do sports.
Go to lake and ONLY do birds.
Go to mountains and ONLY do macro.
etc etc

Well, gosh, there are several approaches and applications for these things.

Auto bracketing (or manual bracketing) is typically used in high-contrast scenes for one of two reasons: you either want to be able to pick a "best of" exposure to work with, or you want to use software to blend multiple exposures to increase the dynamic range of an image capture.

Try going outside on a bright day with a tripod, find a scene with a lot of shadows and areas of light/sky, and set up a "starting point" exposure in the exposure method you normally would work with and set up AEB around that starting point. It could be a shadowy forest, a building half in the sun and half in the shadows, whatever. When you check your shots out at home, one may stand out as "best" or, you may see that the "best" would actually be a blend of them all -- and then the work begins.

DOF? Well, open up your aperture, find a subject that you want to "selectively focus" on, get close enough to frame the subject with some distance to the background take a picture, and voila! You have begun! Start with a flower that you can frame in a way that it's not surrounded by shrubbery but has a relatively distant background. Keep experimenting. Take a portrait of a family member with a relatively wide aperture, say f/5.6, with a distant background and see how you like it, then set your aperture at, say, f/16 and take the same shot and compare.

Low light? Take a picture hand-held without a flash in low light, and grit your teeth at how lousy it looks. Then open your aperture and up your ISO as high as they get. You can start in Av because it will automatically up your shutter speed. Compare the results. Shoot with a tripod in the same scene, and use a little flash in the same scene. Play around and don't get too frustrated. You'll get a feel of what's going on.

Motion blur? What kind of motion blur? Take a night scene of a busy street with a shutter speed of two or three seconds, and you'll get some nice results!

A fun type of motion blur is a bit more challenging: people in thing like motor sports and airplane photography often use it. It's called "panning", where you use a relatively low shutter speed and set your AF to Servo, a relatively small aperture (f/8-f/11) and then focus on a vehicle coming toward you and pan, following their movement focused as much as possible on one spot of the vehicle. Take a series of shots. Look at them at home and moan at how blurry they are. Try again, starting with a faster shutter speed and keep practicing until you get a speed that gives you a motion-blurred background and a sharp-looking vehicle, then smile to yourself and go find a NASCAR race!

Have fun, and try new things!

chopper5654 wrote in post #7388220
can YOU come up with some fun ones to try?

Here's the one that I recently tried. Whether successful or not, I don't really know. One thing for sure is that I had a lot of fun with it :

https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=648744

thanks for the input. sys, i like the zoom-blur stuff a lot. nice.

i like photo essay stuff a lot, too. and, thats kind of what i have in mind. something with a theme.....like "daisies," or "city living."

but, first things first. i want to get my techniques down and then go for more of an all-out "album" of themes. obviously, that starts with taking some shots worthy of posting for comments, which is coming up soon enough.

i just like to see what others have done, too, to kick start me in the right direction. keep the ideas coming please....and thank you.

here are some ideas i came up with off the top...

SHAPES- circles, angles, lines, cubes, etc.
DORMANCY- sleeping people/animals, fallen leaves, trees w/o leaves, winter grasses, etc.
URBAN- architecture, buildings, sculptures, graffiti, parks, etc.
SEASONS- spring, winter, etc.
CABIN FEVER- indoor lighting (w/ color saturation), portraiture, reflections/mirrors, etc.
CARS- fill the frame, blur, etc.

i am just trying to picture albums/folders on the computer that would house these topics. hopefully, i am not confining myself too much by thinking "compartmentally."

Those are concepts you could launch out into. To me they would be less folders and more keywords for my catalog/galleries, but, the important thing is that you have some concepts to go for!

Or, are you suggesting those things for others to go for and post examples? If so, you start!

i was just throwing out some ideas in hopes some people would see where i was going and give some ideas of their own for ME to try when i am practicing.

since i am not one to back down when the guantlet gets thrown, i will roll with one of mine i was playing with this afternoon....circles. it started here (ISO200, 250mm, f/8@1/6),

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my own C&C would be...

#1 is kind of cool, but i would like to see something clearly in focus on top of a chip instead of focusing on the white stack where no one will notice.

#2 has strong composition, imo, but needs a wider DOF to bring more into focus...maybe as far back as the front half of the black chip.