I tend to do well if I do the “spend a month on some subspecies of $activity”, rather than try to perfect everything at the same time. Here’s my list. No idea if I’ll actually do any/many of these, but it’s an idea. (continually updated, I hope)
Short-term Projects
Stuff that could be done in a couple of days.
- Manual focusing (Godfrey DiGiorgi’s technique at the photo.net forum posting)
- Hold the damn camera level
- Try everything with 1×1 (square) format
- Nothing but the 50mm lens
- Shoot B&W in-camera to force B&W visualization (and so you see the B&W results when chimping)
- Long exposoures
- “painting with light” – with Mr. Kebbin’s mega spotlight
- Figure out nuances of graphics tablet
- Play with the Nikon D3 SDK
- Shoot just in DX
- Nothing but wide-angle
- Figure out all the Nikon focusing modes
- Work on body strength and hand-hold the 70-200
Longer-term Projects
Devote a month to it
- Portraiture (in progress)
- Learn Lightroom (in progress)
- Printing
- Panoramas
- Macro
- Dense detail (stitched closeups)
- Improving composition
- True Photoshop studliness
- True Nik Filter studliness
- LAB color studliness
Advertisement
