#Take52 New Weekly Photo Challenge for 2014
Welcome to the New 2014 #Take52 Challenge.
As you may or may not know I’m a photography teacher and I teach in person here in Atlanta (and also online.) As much as I love teaching photography theory and concepts it is all absolutely useless until you go out and PRACTICE your skills so I always encourage my students to shoot shoot shoot and assign them specific assignments to help them do just that.
I think I read somewhere that one needs at least 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill. But it is hard to just head out and take pictures if you have no direction or purpose to your shoot. So in 2012 I came up with the #take52 Challenge – a weekly photography challenge where I deliver a prompt to a group of eager amateur photographers so that they can use it as a theme for that week’s photograph. They they can share it on a secret Facebook group to receive critique and comment on others’ work as well.
The Take 52 Challenge has been going strong now since 2012 and we’re getting ready to get going again. It’s proven to be a wonderful way to improve your photography and connect with other like-minded photographers – something I hadn’t given any thought to when we first began.
If you have never taken part in a weekly photography challenge let me explain a little bit about how it works.
- Sign up to the Challenge below to receive an email each Monday from me with that week’s theme.
- When you sign up you will also receive a link which will direct you to the #Take52 Facebook group. You will have to request to join and then I will approve your request (unless your a robot or a spammer – then’ll I’ll just ban you.
- The Facebook group is where we will share our weekly images and comment and encourage each other with our photography.
- I encourage you to take some time to think about the week’s theme and then off you go to capture an image which relates to that theme. If you like you can upload a image from your catalog but its preferable to shoot something new.
- When your happy with your image, upload and share your image to the Facebook group stating the Theme: Title of your image, Image stats, if you know them (Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO) and one or two lines about the thought process behind your shot. This will help you get to know this stuff and others learn from your technique. (If you don’t know where to find your image information look for EXIF data in your editing program)
- The objective of this Challenge is to help you improve your photography by actually PRACTICING photography. It really doesn’t matter to me if you miss a week and have to play catch up as long as you are shooting, improving and learning a little too.
- Please be kind to each other in the group – so far this group has been extremely supportive of one another and lets keep it that way. No one in the group knows it all and this challenge is designed for people seeking to improve their skill, not experts. If you think lens size, camera type or number of pixels are the most important thing, then you might want to join a different group.
Weekly Themes for the Take 52 Weekly Photo Challenge will be listed here so that you can catch up if you missed a week.
You can sign up for weekly updates of each theme here:
2014 Themes will begin on 1/6/14 so get your batteries charged and get ready!
Hope you’ll join us!
Ingrid
