Monthly Photo Challenge – The Undesirables

The monthly photo challenge is a bit different from the casual photo challenges I’ve given you in the past.  This photo challenge runs for a month (that is the obvious part) and the best photographs will be featured here on the site.  You’ll email your images directly to PhotolisticLife.com as opposed to uploading through social media.  Read on to see the challenge:

Every city, town, or village has areas that are looked over by photographers because of their less than desirable look.  Maybe it’s a bunch of dumpsters in an alley, perhaps it’s the street where you found abandon underwear…  Either way, everyone knows the undesirable areas where they live or play.  This week, the challenge is to visit these areas (safely) and create an image that showcases it.

Lets see how creative you can get!  You can email the images to PhotolisticLife@gmail.comto participate.  Only one image per photographer may be uploaded.  The challenge ends on March 31st.

Tips:

When photographing areas that aren’t “beautiful” you’ll need to rely more heavily on composition builders such as light, framing, leading lines, and weather elements*.  If you’d like to learn how to take your composition to the next level you can read about my Pyramid Of Composition concept here.

*Weather elements are things like rain (think puddle reflections, fog, steam, etc.).

Put away the wide-angle lens.  The image above is actually a large panorama shot with a 70-200mm lens.  Why?  Shooting in this manner, many frames taken with a telephoto lens, stitched together, eliminates the distortion that a traditional wide-angle lens would have.  The longer the focal length the more compressed the scene will look which, to me, keeps the viewers interest spread among many elements as opposed to the foreground.  If I took this shot with a wide-angle lens the tires along the wall would have been the focal point because they are closer to the lens and the closer your subject is to a wide-angle lens the larger that subject will be (while everything behind it will look much further away).

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!  Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments section below.