Ever been stuck along the lines of “Oh, I’ve taken all the pho­tos I can think of, what else can I do?! There’s noth­ing left to pho­to­graph!” ? Well, a good way out of that misery — and gen­er­ally a great way to fuel your cre­ativ­ity — is to par­ti­cip­ate in pho­to­graphy assign­ments /​con­test. Pretty much every pho­to­graphy com­munity, forum, pod­cast, etc. gives out assign­ments, sooner or later. This basic­ally just means you’re given a theme to illus­trate and time frame to do that in. The top­ics are usu­ally pretty abstract things, but some­times it can get pretty con­crete as well.

I shot the photo above for an assign­ment given out by Happy Shoot­ing, a very nice pho­to­graphy pod­cast (in Ger­man). The topic was “blitzges­cheit”, which is a bit hard to trans­late into Eng­lish. It lit­er­ally means “smart as a tack”, but it can also be seen as a play on words, as it com­bines “Blitz” – flash and “ges­cheit” – clever. I had spent about a week pon­der­ing about the topic, when I finally came up with an idea, inspired by cam­era toss­ing (a rather risky branch of pho­to­graphy, where you throw your cam­era in the air and see what comes out): Flash Toss­ing! I put my cam­era on a tri­pod in my room (at night, with the lights turned off), set it to a long expos­ure, released and threw my flash gun across the frame, after push­ing its TEST but­ton which makes it fire a burst of flashes.

After about 20 throws, I got the pic­ture above. It had the nicest move­ment through the air, and fit nicely in the frame. Oh, and of note: I threw the flash over my bed, so it had a soft land­ing. How­ever, on second though, I wouldn’t do it again, as the fil­a­ment in the flash bulb might just as well have ripped, even with a soft land­ing… Not sure how robust they are.