24 Picture Limit - Creativity Excercise One

Do you ever dream yourself back to the good old days horrible time when your camera only held twenty-four pictures? Where, to make it even worse, you could not erase any of the pictures once you had taken them. If so, you are sure to appreciate todays exercise. This is an easy exercise in limitations and concentration you can do almost anywhere, anytime.

You start by giving yourself a set time. Five, fifteen, thirty minutes or what suits you and the surroundings. If you got a timer or an eggclock, set it. In this time you should take tweny-four different pictures, with any camera of your fancy. DSLR, DUC, whatever. Sort of an one-person photo contest, where you yourself is the judge.

If you never done this before, chances are you will not be able to use more than one or two of the resulting pictures, but that is not the point. The goal of the excercis is to draw harder and harder limits around yourself, until you can do this in four minutes or less. This gives you roughly ten seconds per picture.

With ten seconds between pictures I can hardly move. How do I take different pictures from a single spot? You have to rethink a bit. Height, for example is a thing I myself has to fight when I take pictures. It is so easy to forget that the camera, unlike yoour eyes, do not have to reside at eye-height. It can reside at camera-height, which is almost anywhere.

Take pictures of youself. It has not to be perfect portraits. Shoot your T-shirt. Check your bald spot. Wing an ear.


Put your camera on the ground. Things look very different from there. Do you have a monopod? Put the camera on it, stretch out, and let the camera see the world from a basketball player perspective. With the help of the timer, you can lock your camera inside your fridge, to once and for all check out whether the little light inside actually goes out when you close the door.

As soon as you realise that you do not have to hold your head pressed to the back of the camera, you are free. And thats one of the points with limitations. They make you understand freedom. Remember, creativity lives in ideas, not in tools.

Try to do a 24P-set at least once a week. It's easy. Give yourself a random timelimit. "I will finish before my lunch date shows up". Or until the next train, until the meeting starts etc etc. This is a easy way to build creativity muscles. Before long, you will find yourself capable of actually doing twenty-four good pictures in a row, without any fillers or throw-aways.