My photography friend (and inspiration, quite often) Anne Skidmore and I occasionally try to motivate each other to shoot. Anne gave me a 30 minute assignment… “go out and shoot at night… for 30 minutes”.

It was cold. Cold as all hell.

The need to create, practice, test, fail, try again, reshoot.  Some folks have to just do it. I need to just do it. Solving problems, testing new ideas, and practicing skills is important in any line of work.  It’s especially important for creatives.

It’s like muscle memory; the more often you do something, the better your brain is at remembering how it was done, and how to do it efficiently. My thought is this… the more I do something, the less work I have to do performing the regular movements, which leaves me more time to be creative.

So, freezing my hands off, I decided to set my camera up, and shoot a few long exposures (30 seconds). After I had remotely triggered the camera, I grabbed one of my SB600 flashguns, and started running around, striking a pose, and triggering the test flash.

You can see the result here.

I was cold, but it was kind of fun to go after it, and get it done. I want to see what Anne did. She gave herself the same assignment.