"I've a little challenge for you" he said...

"for the next week (or even 10 days), go out and take a picture, just one, and that one has to be the best of all the many other photos that you could have taken. Don’t crop it, edit it or enhance it in any way. The photos can be of anything at all, as long as you take one and only one each day."

Dermot had finally pulled together his proofs from our trip to the North Coast and after seeing them I was feeling a bit down. It's hard to find a good excuse as to why your photos aren't great and it gets harder when you lose the obvious "sure, he had better weather" or the best selling "I could have taken that if I'd been there". I was left with the classic "His toys are better than mine" and the self effacing "I suck bigtime" (copyright 'Yerman', 2008).

So, in an effort to help me focus (Lord I may suck at photography, but I'm the pun master!) on what I'd learned and to give me a short term goal, Dermot set me the shot a day challenge.

I accepted.

I may have been mad, and I quickly had to follow it up with some caveats about still being allowed to snap my family and make use of the camera for the purpose of the macro project (the close up filters have arrived).

But apart from that, I'm allowed one shot.

In an effort to make it really interesting I've decided on a few other terms. I'm only going to use the camera and kit lens. I'm also going to make use of the manual function. I'll also try to explain here exactly what I wanted to achieve and an honest assessment of whether I did or didn't. Feel free to comment.

Day 1

I guess a lot of these shots are going to be around the house. I can't see me travelling 30 miles for a sunset when I have just one chance to get it right. I also can't see my missus and kid being too happy if I head out every night. (Though, they might like the peace and quiet).

(F/5.6, 1/100sec, 55mm, ISO-200, 23/05/08)

The idea was to pick out this cluster of flowers and throw as much of the rest of the background bush out of focus as possible.  What I wanted to achieve was just a simple shot of some flowers.

I think it would have worked better if I'd gotten closer to the flowers I wanted to help throw the DOF a little more. I also think it would have been better if I'd isolated the flowers more, maybe tried to lift them out of the image by removing or adjusting the flowers directly behind the front set. In the end, I think it's probably too noisy with not enough area for the eye to settle on if that makes sense?

Comments?