How do you get good at something? Practice. On the face of it, that seems like an obvious prescription until you ask the natural follow-up: practice what? One of the time-honoured practice techniques that photographers use to maintain their edge is the self-assignment. This is exactly what it sounds like: tell yourself to shoot something specific, give yourself a deadline, and then complete the assignment.

These exercises help you achieve many things: expand your boundaries, train your eye to see in a different way or give your creativity a tune-up. Before the rise of digital equipment, the self assignment could turn into an expensive indulgence since a lot of shots would be rejects but you’d still have to pay for film processing. With digital, that ongoing cost isn’t there, so you can feel free to shoot dozens or hundreds of images on your road to photographic self-improvement.

Self-assignments work best if they push you out of your comfort zone. If you always photograph outdoors, there’s nothing like an indoor assignment to force you to explore your camera’s ISO settings or how to use flash and other artificial lighting techniques. If you always shoot landscapes, assign yourself portraits and a whole new set of challenges and possibilities will open up.

Self assignments can help you re-train your photographic eye by forcing you to look differently at something, particularly something you’ve seen so often it’s become invisible. This could be a building or monument or even a nondescript scene you’ve walked by dozens of times before. Give yourself the assignment to take 25 different photos of that subject during a fixed period of time. This will challenge you take another look and push beyond the “nothing here worth photographing” mentality. You might try shots from far away, or macro shots of interesting details You can explore the differences between taking the object’s lit and shadowed sides, or choose different times - morning, afternoon and night - to shoot the subject.

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