Take ten creative photos of ordinary objects

Taking creative photos of ordinary objects works because of the constraint rather than the subject. Ten photographs of one spoon forces you past the obvious angle within about three shots, and everything after that requires genuinely new thinking about light, distance and framing.

Why take ten creative photos of ordinary objects is worth an hour

Novelty normally does the work in photography: an interesting subject makes a mediocre photograph acceptable. Removing that support exposes your actual compositional decisions. The tenth photograph is where it becomes interesting, because by then every easy option is used and you have to try something you would not otherwise have considered.

How to take ten creative photos of ordinary objects step by step

1. 1

   Pick one deliberately dull object

   A fork, a plug, a lemon, a doorknob. The less inherently interesting it is, the better the exercise works.

2. 2

   Take the obvious shot immediately

   Get it out of your system in the first thirty seconds so it stops occupying your attention.

3. 3

   Change one variable per shot

   Distance, angle, light direction, background, focus point. One deliberate change each time.

4. 4

   Get much closer than feels right

   Extreme close-ups make familiar objects unrecognizable, which is often where the best frames appear.

5. 5

   Move the light, not just the camera

   A window, a lamp, a phone torch from the side. Light direction changes the object more than position does.

Tips to get more out of it

• Shoot against plain uncluttered backgrounds. A busy background is by far the commonest reason an otherwise good still life fails.
• Try photographing the shadow as the subject rather than the object casting it. It produces a genuinely different photograph from the same setup.
• Review all ten of them together afterwards, side by side. The progression from the first to the tenth is the actual output of this exercise.

Ways to mix it up

If ten feels too few, do thirty and note where you started struggling, since that point is your current default range. If you want more difficulty, use one focal length and one position, changing only the light across all ten.

Take ten creative photos of ordinary objects: frequently asked questions