The Daring Assignments

Here are ten progressive challenges, each bolder than the last, designed to push your courage and your eye together. Do them in order; each builds on the nerve of the one before. Track each as you complete it.

The ten assignments

1. The follower. Choose one interesting stranger and photograph them, discreetly and respectfully, across several frames as they move through a scene. Learn to anticipate and stay with a subject.

2. The asker. Ask three strangers for a posed portrait. Direct them gently. Learn the collaboration of the consented portrait.

3. The one-metre frame. Make ten frames from roughly one metre, as in the 1-Meter Rule lesson.

4. The eye contact. Make five frames where the subject is looking directly into the lens. Hold the moment instead of fleeing it.

5. The shadow. Spend an hour photographing only people interacting with hard light and shadow. Light as the subject.

6. The gesture. Capture ten peak gestures: a hand raised, a laugh, a step over a puddle. Train anticipation.

7. The wait. Find one stage and stay forty-five minutes, working it as people pass. Patience over wandering.

8. The crowd. Wade into a dense crowd, a market, a protest, a festival, and shoot from within it. Closeness in chaos.

9. The conversation. Photograph someone, then talk to them. Turn the frame into a human encounter. Often the best images and the best stories come after the conversation starts.

10. The self in the frame. Put yourself into a photograph, via shadow or reflection, in the spirit of Friedlander. Acknowledge that you are part of the scene.

How to use them

Do not rush. One assignment per outing is plenty. Journal each: what you feared, what happened, what you learned. By the tenth, the photographer who started at assignment one will feel like a different person holding the camera. That transformation, more than any single image, is the point.