24 Shots: A Fun Exercise to Get You Thinking About Your Photography

When I was a kid, I used to shoot a ton of film, so much that I was eventually given a roll a week by my parents to shoot whatever I cared to. But of course, I had to carefully choose what I shot over the course of each week. The thrill was getting the envelope of prints back from the grocery store a few weeks later. This fun challenge recaptures a lot of that nostalgia and exercises your photographic brain.

Coming to you from Nigel Danson, this video follows him as he takes nothing but a single camera and prime lens on a landscape shoot with an allowance of only 24 shots, much like an old roll of film. Of course, even if you're not one for the nostalgia or you're too young to have shot film growing up, it's still a very good exercise in carefully thinking through shots and really evaluating a scene for everything it contains and how you'd like to shoot it before you press the shutter button. And while you should definitely try this with your digital equipment, if you've never done it with actual film, go out and grab a disposable camera for the weekend; it's a ton of fun.

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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5 Comments

I like doing this often. One thing I haven't done that he also did was restrict himself to one subject. I would think that by the end of that 24 image allowance, I'd be finding pretty creative angles to photograph a tree.

These types of excersizes can be very helpful. I’m pleased to see them highlighted here. I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Orsen Wells, “the enemy of art is the absence of limitation”. Self-imposed limitations can sometimes be more artistically rewarding than limiteless choice.

Brutal video...i mean, cool project and all but this guy is stumbling his words and the overall production quality is pretty low in comparison to a lot of other you tubers. And why is it ok for these blogs to just reshare videos ALLLL the time. How about some original content. I must say I am glad it's not another Thomas Heaton post because I am subbed to him and see those videos usually days before. so the whole having a blog to share videos from youtube is pretty worthless. Peta P and this blog both are becoming trash.

We've already posted 3 original articles today with more to come: https://fstoppers.com/#originals

The learning curve was steep back then. I used to carry a small notebook in which I wrote down every setting I used. Afterwards, when the pictures were printed, I looked at every picture and tried to figure out what the change in setting did to the pictures. I used to take 5 rolls of film on holiday because getting more printed was far too expensive.
Every shot you took cost money.
I don't want to go back in time. I have 0 nostalgic feelings towards that time period.