Sometimes it helps to have a little extra motivation to stay focused on something you know is good for you. Photography has always been a fun hobby for me. I've never imagined it to be anything other than a great way to break out of my routinely technical way of thinking. When a colleague of mine at work sent out an invitation to join a Facebook group, called "30 Pics in 30 Days", whose challenge is to post a photo per day for 30 days I decided this sounded like a good way to get that little extra motivation I've been lacking lately. And so here I am, back to exercising the right side of my brain and having fun with my camera and computer again.
In preparation for the challenge I thought about how I wanted to approach it. The spirit of the challenge is to push myself and try new things. To that end I first installed the beta version of Lightroom 5. I've been a Lightroom fan since it was code-named Shadowland and I do my best to keep up with all of its advances. Another thing I wanted to do as part of this challenge was to not limit myself to any one particular lens on my camera. In fact, it seemed most fitting to use each of my lenses equally. This turned out to be an easy strategy to implement since I have 6 lenses for my camera. I'll use each one for 5 days. This will help me to see things as differently as possible while I'm shooting and not get stuck in a lens rut (trust me, I've been there many times before). Of course, there is one challenge to resolve with a stable of 6 lenses: in what order should I use them? Lucky for me (at times) I'm an über geek so I wrote a little script to randomly determine the order in which I'll be using my lenses. Here's the results of my script: 100mm macro, 40mm pancake, 70-200mm zoom, 28mm wide angle prime, 50mm normal prime, and the 24-105mm zoom.
Here's to stepping out of my comfort zone and having fun at the same time.
