For the month of September I set myself a challenge: take a macro photograph every day for 30 days.
There were a few reasons that I did this. The first was that since having Chloe (my daughter), I haven't been shooting much and I wanted some motivation to get back into taking photographs. Secondly, I thought it would be great personal development to create a challenge and actually stick to it.
The idea was to take a macro photograph every day, edit it and then put it up on social media. I'm proud to say that I stuck to this and took 30 macro photographs in September. I actually took a lot more as it takes a few photographs to get the best but I posted 30.
Having two kids at home, I wanted to make this as easy as possible. Most of the time I took the photo during Chloe's half an hour nap. I also wanted to take the photographs around the house so my garden was the subject of all but one of my photographs.
I learnt a lot by doing this challenge. I discovered that there is a lot of beauty in the leaves of plants. I often found myself drawn the to leaves of the flowers instead of the flowers themselves. Normally, I would wait for a completely calm day as any wind can make the photograph out of focus. As I had to take a photograph every day, I had no choice but to work around the wind. I also found that using the screen instead of the viewfinder was a lot easier. I was able to focus better using the screen and more of my photographs were sharp as a result.
I enjoyed this challenge a lot more than I thought I would. It was nice to go out everyday and be distracted by nature. Have you ever done a challenge before? How did you find it?
