The Beginner Photography Podcast

Better Photos Start With This One Thing: Fun

• Raymond Hatfield

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#592 In today’s episode, we’re exploring how to rediscover the fun in photography at any skill level, with creative tips and hands-on strategies to keep your passion alive!

Photography can sometimes feel overwhelming—too many buttons, confusing settings, and the pressure to get everything perfect can zap the fun right out of it. If you’ve ever felt bogged down or like photography is turning into work instead of play, you’re not alone. Today’s conversation is here to help you shake off that stress and bring back the joy that made you pick up your camera in the first place. Together, we’ll explore new ways to simplify your process, experiment fearlessly, and enjoy your growth as a photographer, no matter what camera you use.

  1. Keep Photography Simple and Playful: Bring back the joy by using straightforward gear or even your phone, focusing less on technical perfection and more on spontaneous moments.
    • Choose a point-and-shoot camera or a simple camera app like Huji.
    • Go out and snap photos just for the experience, not for perfection.
  2. Make Your Work Tangible: Printing your photos or giving them as gifts can reignite your excitement and create meaningful connections.
    • Try printing a few favorite shots at a local store or with an instant photo printer.
    • Hand a print to a friend or family member and see how it transforms your memories into something truly special.
  3. Try New Experiments and Share the Experience: Fun comes from creative play and community. Test different techniques—like double exposures, intentional camera movement, or using vintage lenses—and connect with others to share what you’ve discovered.
    • Pick one creative technique to try this week, letting go of the end result.
    • Join a photography group, online or local, to talk about your process and learn from fellow enthusiasts.

Resources:

Ultimate Photography Education Bundle - https://beginnerphotopod.com/bundle

Sign up for your free CloudSpot Account today at www.DeliverPhotos.com

Connect with Raymond!


Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

When I had first started, I thought that upgrading my gear was the fun part. Later, I found more joy in chasing moments than more megapixels. Your fun evolves, right? It's not always the exact same thing. At every stage of photography, I find a new level of fun. Hey, welcome to the Beginner Photography Podcast. I'm your host, Raymond Hadfield. And today, well, today, talking about something that might sound a little silly at first, which is how to make photography fun, right? Here is the deal that I found with photography. It's that photography, it is fun, right? It's one of the reasons why we all picked up a camera in the first place. We enjoy creating something with our camera. There's this level of novelty to it at first, and it is just a lot of fun. However, somewhere along the way, you try to learn more about photography. There's lots of buttons involved, there's lots of menus. What's the exposure triangle? There's lots of rules. And it can start to feel. Well, it can start to feel heavy, right? Almost like homework. And I don't know about you, but I've never heard any kid describe homework as fun. So we need to figure out how to bring some fun back into photography. Because when photography starts to feel like work, that is when we stop shooting. And if you stop shooting, that means that you stop telling your story of how you view the world. And we can't have that. So it's the fun that brings us back into photography, right? It keeps us shooting. It's fun. That is what fuels our practice in photography. And practice, as you know, is just gonna make us a better photograph. That's why I say at the end of every episode, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. The more that you practice, the better we will become. So today, what I want to do is share some simple, easy and effective ways to kind of re inject some of that fun into your photography, no matter what your gear or skill level is. But first, guess what? The Beginner Photography podcast is brought to you by cloudspot. Cloudspot is the all in one solution for photographers who need to not only deliver photos to clients, but also start before that, from being able to send contracts, being able to send emails, deal with all of your communication, sell prints, and again, of course, deliver beautiful, beautiful image galleries wherever you are at in your photography journey. Cloudspot can help you get to that next level, I promise you. So go ahead and grab your free forever account today over@deliverphotos.com and tell them Raymond sent you. So the first thing that I really want to say before getting into today's episode is that you may be in the thick of learning photography, right? Like I mentioned earlier, there's all the things that you have to learn. The buttons, the menus, the how exposure works, all of these things, what lens does. What about aperture? Can I, you know, all of it. And it can feel overwhelming. I get that. Right? It doesn't feel like fun right now. So these ideas that I'm going to share with you today will help you with that, like a hundred percent. It's going to bring back a lot of joy into your photography. But I also want you to know that the more you learn about photography, about how to use your camera, the more comfortable you become with all of it, right? Because the more that you understand the fundamentals of photography, the more fun it becomes. In the same way that when you were learning how to use, how to not use a car, how to drive a car, it was probably a lot more scary than it was fun because you were scared that you were going to wreck the car or, you know, run over somebody or their dog or something, you know, whatever. But today, I bet you would categorize driving more as fun than it is scary because you know how to use the tool that is a car. And that in and of itself brings a level of comfort to actually doing the thing to driving. So all I'm saying is stick with it. And these tips, I hope, will get you to that point to where you're more comfortable just a little bit quicker as well. So let's go ahead and dive into these few tips that I have for you today to make photography more fun. The first tip that I have for you is simply keep it simple. Sometimes we as photographers make photography harder than what it needs to be, you know, but when we think back to when we were children and that might be some of the most fun you've ever had with a camera. You were using probably something that was like a disposable camera, or today maybe it's something just like a phone. You know that the reason why these tools are fun is because it's. There's a level of freedom that you get from the simplicity. You're not worrying about aperture, you're not worrying about autofocus, you're not worrying about the things that make a photo, you know, quote, unquote, perfect. What you're doing is enjoying the experience. And then photography is just a layer on top of the experience in and of itself. And that's the point of this, right? Sure, you can use a camera to build a business, to capture somebody's wedding day, like really big moments. But you can also use a camera to enhance your own life, enhance the experience that you are having. And it's not just, you know, the, the camera and the photography isn't the goal in and of itself. So in that essence, it's like going back to being a kid again and just shooting for the fun of it. I just said this a few minutes ago. The more you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. I don't say the more perfect shots you get today, the better of a photographer you'll be. Tomor I said the more you shoot today, the meaning there is shoe more, think less, right? Worry less about all of the tiny micro decisions that you have to make in photography to what would you know, make a quote unquote perfect image and just take the shot. You can always take a shot, look at it and then reassess. I'm the kind of person I'm that I've been learning when I look at a scene in front of me, I can get an idea of the photo that I want to take. And I will take the photo. I'll look at the photo and say that doesn't work. And then I will retake the photo in a different way. But sometimes just looking at it with my two, you know, eyes, I don't see it in the same way that I would until I actually see the image itself, right? Sometimes it's because you have an ultra wide lens on your camera. Sometimes it's more telephoto, sometimes it's just the way that it's framed. There's something that, when it's within the confines of the image itself, make potential issues or a composition just stand out better and then you can dive in from there, right? So again, shoot more, think less, don't try to capture the perfect image first. Just capture an image and then work towards getting better every time you take a shot, you know, so. But point is, keep it as simple as possible, right? It's those first steps that can make photography so much fun. So in my own life, here's how I do it, right? Because I need this level of checking out and not taking it so seriously for it to be lots of fun. So I have this maybe you've heard me talk about on the podcast before. It's the Sony TX20 point and shoot camera. It came out in 2012, right? It's just a point and shoot camera. That's it. It's amazing. It boots up crazy fast. It is waterproof, it is dustproof, it is shockproof, it is freeze proof. Yeah. And you can turn it on and within 1, 2, 3, you can take a photo, right? And then you just close it back up or turn off the camera and then you just put it away. And that three seconds is with a full flash. If I turn off flash, I can easily take a photo within like a second and a half of just sliding down the front cover, take the photo and then covering it up and then being done again. That to me is fun, right? I use this camera when I go to concerts or like an outing with a family, or a fun day, like in a new location where I don't want to bring a full camera. This is the camera that I bring when I want to be present. And being present is more important than the photos that I capture. Right. I know that that sounds, you know, sacrilegious, you know, to a photographer, but when we're talking about introducing more fun into your photography, that's the way that I do it. It's just. It's snapshots, right? It's elevated snapshots. You can just open it up, compose a quick frame, see something interesting, get it high, get it low, whatever you want to do, take the shot and then you're done. Back to being present with your friends, with you. Keep going. Now, sometimes you go out and you're not expecting for an event like a concert or something like that. Sometimes the day just evolves into something bigger than what it was. For example, earlier this summer we had went downtown Indy, I think, to just go to the mall or something like that. But while we were out there, we're like, hey, why don't we take a nice walk along the beautiful walking path and the canal. It's a beautiful day. Let's do that. I didn't bring my point and shoot camera cause I wasn't expecting anything like that to happen. I thought we were just going to go do something quick, but I did have my phone. So in a situation like that, I have an app on my phone called Huji. Think of it like Fuji, but with an H. And what it is, is. I mean, it is. It is dead simple. It looks like a disposable camera, right? If you're looking on YouTube right now, the app just looks like a disposable camera. You can open up the viewfinder and then have a better clearer, but that's it. There's no zoom, there's no Effects. There's no. Nothing like that. You just open it up, you take the photo, and then you're done. And it creates this visual aesthetic similar to a disposable camera. So I do like that it doesn't just feel like another phone photo, because anybody can take a phone photo. But also, these aren't necessarily photos that I'd want to go back and spend time editing. Right. It's just like I want to capture this moment and then be done again. These are snapshots. These aren't like curated works of art that you might go out and create. There's a space for both of those. So I just take the photo. It automatically applies this disposable camera aesthetic to the image, and then it's done. It saved in my camera roll, and again I move on. So those are the two ways that I like to keep photography incredibly, incredibly simple and still be able to get interesting photos that are more than just. More than just the photos that you would take every day. There's a level of intent into them. So check those out. Well, don't check out the Sony TX20 because I don't want you to drive up the price just in case this thing dies on me. I want to still be able to buy another one on ebay because it is incredible and not have to spend 500 on it. But definitely check out the Huji app if you are an iPhone user. I don't know if it's on Android, but I'm sure that they have some sort of similar version on Android. But here's the thing, also with that app, there's no, like, hundred different filters you could choose. There's none of that. It's just it is what it is. And that's. That's what keeps it simple for me. I don't have to go up, go out and say, do I want this to be a black and white, you know, film simulation? Do I want it to be more contrasty? Do I want it to be super flat? No, it's just, you take the photo, there's no control over it, and then it's done. I love it. Okay, tip number two for keeping photography simple is to make it tangible. You know what's really fun in photography? As much as I love going out and shooting and spending time out in, you know, a beautiful location or just noticing beautiful light going somewhere new, it is actually seeing the photos in my hand. It's having a printed version of these photos. We are so used to just taking a photo and then it just shows up. On all of our devices, our phone, our, you know, an iPad, a computer or whatever, that we kind of miss this, this element of this, this huge element of photography, which is the tangible aspect of it, the being able to hold a photo in your hand. Printing feels like magic. It truly does. It's like you went out, you saw something and now, you know, you edit it or you don't edit it, but once you get a print of it, it feels complete. Right? We also live in this world where we do a lot of pixel peeping. We worry a lot about resolution, but you'll find very quickly that Even like a 4 megapixel photo can print an 8 by 10, which is like a good size print. You know, you don't need a ton of resolution for a great print. And, and they're so fricking cheap too. Like you can get four by sixes from like Walgreens or CVS or Costco or something like that for like 18 cents a print. Like, give me a break. You know, you're not printing 200 photos at a time. Even just printing four or five photos, you know, that's less than five bucks. That's like $2. Crazy, crazy cheap. And again, holding it in your hand feels incredible. Now you layer that on top of actually giving a print to a friend or family member. Holy cow, you just made their day. So I'm talking a lot about like four by sixes and prints that you can get from actual print labs. And those are great. I love them. However, sometimes for me, speed is the name of the game, right? Simplicity. Because when you keep it simple, you're keeping it fun. I have this Fuji Instax printer. They've made a bunch of them. You can buy them in like Walmart, Amazon, they're fantastic. I have the Fujifilm SP2, which is discontinued. And the only reason why I have it is because it connects directly to my Fujifilm X Pro 2. So what that means is I can take a photo on my camera and then directly print it onto an Instax print with this printer. I love it. Now they don't make that printer anymore and they don't have the same option to be able to print directly from a camera much anymore. However, all the printers, the Instax printers that they make today connect to your phone. So if you get a photo onto your phone or your computer, you can then print it out with a. You can print out an Instax print from there. And again, just giving it to somebody and it's film, right? It's not like, it's not like a four by six, which sometimes feels digital. It's a, It's a piece of film like you shot a photo, but what you're giving them is the film that feels incredible and super fast. Relatively cheap. It's about a dollar, you know, per. Per photo that you print out. And the whole thing, the. The photo is the size of a credit card. So it's super easy to, like, hold on to. It's not overwhelming. You're not worried about, like bending it or doing anything crazy because you can fit it in your wallet, like where your driver's license is. You can fit it in between the case of. Of what? Your phone and the case itself. And have this mobile little piece of art. There's so many things that you can do with these Instax prints. It is so much fun. This is not sponsored. I just love feeling an Instax print in my hand and holding it. And again, the aesthetic, it looks great. It's a ton of fun. So check out these printers on Amazon if you haven't already. Or again, just print out your photos at Walgreens, Walmart, Costco, wherever. 4x6 is super cheap. When you give them to somebody, the look on their face, they light up. That makes it all worth it. It is so much more than just the ink in the paper. You know what I mean? Like, that's all that you're giving them, a piece of paper with some ink on it. But the value of that to them is so much more always so appreciative. Appreciative. So give it a try. All right. Thing number three that you can do to introduce more fun into your photography, bring back some fun, is just to experiment and play. You know, fun doesn't necessarily always mean easy, because sometimes fun comes from just trying something new. I'm not amazing at playing disc golf. I love to play disc golf. And it's fun. It doesn't mean that it's easy, right? You. You approach a. A pad and the. In the basket's like 500 yards away, and it's a very heavily wooded area. And it's not easy, but when you, when you approach it with a certain mindset, it is fun, right? You can try something new. You can, you can backhand it. You can. While keeping this related to photography, within photography, there's a lot of things that you can try that are fun that aren't necessarily easy, right? And it's trying new things. So in photography, that could mean trying double exposures. I just shot a roll of double exposures on film. I haven't got the photos back yet. I have no idea how they're going to turn out. But the I like, I had so much fun shooting it because I had this idea in my head and then I attacked it. And just knowing how I shot it and the level of excitement that I had while shooting it, that was fun. And honestly, if I get back all the photos and they're garbage, is that going to suck? Of course. But still, the act of shooting itself was a ton of fun. And now I will have at least some sort of direction to move forward next time so that I can create better double exposures. Maybe for you it's not double exposures. Maybe it's not film. Maybe it's something like intentional camera movement, right? You want to get that shot where you're moving the camera, but the person or the car or the object that you're tracking is still perfectly in the frame frame. While everything else is like. Like has a lot of motion blur to it. It's blurry and you can barely tell what's going on. I like to do this at my daughter's softball games Whenever there's a pitcher and then they go to like, you know, wind up and bring the hand under and release the ball. The majority of their torso in that time does not move as much as their arms and legs. So it's like their head, Their torso can be relatively frozen in a shot, but their hands and legs have a lot of motion to them and. And then the whole world around them is also. It looks like it's going a million miles an hour. And that I love that look. However, it takes a lot of time to get right. It's not easy to nail that right away. So it's fun to achieve that. It's fun to try that. But that doesn't mean that it's super easy, but it's worth it. And when you get one shot out of like 200 of trying it, it feels like it's all worth it. It another thing that you may be trying is something like freelancing, where you actually disconnect the lens from your camera and then just hold it in front of your camera and try to rotate it in interesting ways to not only act as like a macro lens, right? You can get really close up shots, but also it creates like this dreamy quality to the image that you don't get when the lens is traditionally mounted to the camera. Again, that's one of those things where it's difficult to focus. It's difficult to get an area right in your camera looking good. So it takes time, but you're not in it for the perfect shot. You're in it for the experience of trying something new, experimenting, and playing, you know? So for you, you might be thinking about attempting a new style. If you're a landscape person, maybe shoot a few portraits. If you love portraits, maybe try some abstract photos. Right. There's a lot of ways that we can experiment and play Jeff Bridges, the actor who plays the dude in the Big Lebowski. He has this book called the dude and the Zen Master. And in it, it's Jeff. It's. Yeah, Jeff. I was about to say Jeff Lebowski. It's Jeff Bridges talking with a friend of his who is a Zen master. Right. And Jeff Bridges brings up this idea of plorking. And I've talked about this on the PODC before. Maybe you remember me talking about it. Plorking is the combination of playing and working together. Like, are you playing around? Yes, but you're not just playing around just to play. You're playing in a direction to. To move you forward in some way. So he used the example of plorking around on the guitar. He's just kind of just messing around and just figuring it out. And even though he's not working in a. In a structured way, he knows that just kind of playing around and having fun with it will get him closer to a level of competency or mastery. But you have to just kind of play around and see how these things work at first to be able to go deeper or to be able to really learn how to use them in your own style. So, you know, some things that you could do is buy some. Buy a cheap vintage lens. Right? That's a fun way to just kind of play around. Typically, cheap vent or vintage lenses are relatively cheap. Canon makes a series of. Made a huge series of what's called FD lenses, what they used for their film cameras for a long time that can then be adapted and mounted to modern SLRs or even mirrorless cameras. And when you do that, you know, you can get like a 28 millimeter lens for, you know, 75 bucks. But if you were to buy a 28 millimeter lens RF lens, you're looking at several hundred dollars, if not a thousand dollars. So is it going to be perfect? No, but it's just a easy way to kind of play around and see what you can do with this new thing. And if it breaks by chance, well, you're only at, like, 50, 75 bucks. But you tried something new. Here's something that I did by just playing around and it was, I bought a magnifying glass, like a big, like, like a detectives sized magnifying glass that like, when you think of like Inspector Gadget, he had like this giant magnifying glass that he held up, had a handle on it and would, you know, I don't know, inspect things. If you take the casing off around the magnifying glass, it leaves you with just the, the lens itself. If you put that in front of your camera lens, you now have a macro lens, right? The whole point of a magnifying glass is to magnify what's there. And that's exactly what a macro lens does. I wouldn't have done that. Like I didn't see any tutorials on YouTube or anything, but I was at, I think it was Marshalls and they had one of those magnifying glasses and I was like, this is crazy. And I was just playing around with it and I thought, I wonder what this would look like in front of a lens. And sure enough, I bought it. It was like eight bucks, turned out fantastic and saved me over $1,000 from having to buy a dedicated macro lens because I used it at weddings as well. So again, you got to play around, you got to plork. Another thing that I love doing in photography, specifically weddings, is creating Breniser images. Breniser is named after Ryan Breniser and this who I had on the podcast years ago. The technique is you take a series of images, right? So you'll be looking, you'll be looking in one spot. Then you take another photo just a little bit to the right. And then you take another photo just a little bit more to the right. And then you take another photo just a little bit more to the right. And then you take that series of photos and then you bring them into Photoshop and then stitch them together into a seamless photo. So now you have a panorama image or you know, if you, if you also go up and down with the images, not just left and right, you can create just a larger image, like a huge resolution. And it creates this incredibly thin depth of field because you're not changing your aperture or your focus point. But now you're essentially increasing the size of the image sensor, for lack of a really technical term. Well, I would do these at weddings because it's a, it's a very interesting visual look. Well, one winter I was bored and I decided, oh, I'm gonna print out, you know, all 30 or 40 images that I. That I took to create one Breniser image and just kind of piece them together, man. And once I did that, I laid them out on the table and put the whole thing together. I loved it so much that it completely changed my photography. Instead of creating a seamless stitch to create just one single image in Photoshop, what you're doing is like this. You're creating this, this. This collage in a sense of images, and it's so perfectly imperfect and it feels so human. I loved it so much that I started doing it more often. I started doing it at every wedding. And then I started printing out more photos that I would do at these weddings. I would mount them onto a piece of mounting board. I would then frame it, and then I would give it to my couples, just as a way to say thank you. You know, I would never sell it to them because I didn't offer this as a product. It was just something that I wanted to try. And then if I liked it, then I would give it to them if they liked it, which, nine times out of 10. But no, nine times out of nine, when I would hand it to them, they would all, like, gasp. They'd be like, wow, this is incredible. Now, whether or not they would actually hang it on their wall, I'm not entirely sure. But being able, again, to give it to your clients, it's something tangible. It's something that I played around with, it's something that I loved in photography. Checked off so many boxes for things that I loved, and it made it so much more fun. All right, now let's move on to thing number four that you can do in photography to make it more fun, and that is to, well, go deeper. Fun has a way of evolving, right? When we were children, what was fun was not exactly the same things that we find fun today, right? So, again, it evolves. When I had first started, I thought that upgrading my gear was the fun part. Later, I found more joy in chasing moments than, you know, more megapixels. But then what I found fun was obsessing over light. And then once I did that, then that's when I found and found more fun by creating the photo stitches that I was just telling you about. Like, your fun evolves, right? It's not always the exact same thing. At every stage of photography, I find a new level or layer, rather, I guess, of. Of fun, right? It's kind of like peeling an onion, except. Except instead of tears, it's. You get, I don't know, curiosity, right? Maybe that was a bad analogy. But the point is, try to go deeper in whatever it is that you're working on right now. Like, what is it that you truly enjoy doing? I know a lot of people enjoy doing portraits, right? Portraits then maybe turns into headshots. You enjoy doing headshots. And then you think to yourself, oh, corporate, maybe commercial, maybe I'll try to photograph beverages. So then you go deeper into that. Oh, beverages. Oh, what if it's just. Just clear beverages. Okay, so then you just start photographing clear beverages. And then you get better at lighting clear beverages and having interesting backgrounds. And then you get better into the Photoshop side of photographing product images. And before you know it, maybe you are this, you know, world renowned commercial photographer, but you started off just doing family photos. There's always a way to go deeper or evolve into what it is that you love about photography. So find a new way to go deeper and you will find a new way to have fun in photography. For me, learning is fun. I love the learning process. So the deeper you go, you're always learning something new. If I'm doing the exact same thing every single time over and over and over again, I'm going to get bored. I need to have something interesting, have something new, have something unique that is going to keep my attention, that is going to be fun. And I do that by going deeper. All right, number five, the fifth way that you can have more fun in photography is to share it with others. Yeah. And I don't mean like sharing the photos. We talked about that earlier. As far as, like, tangibly. I mean, photography is oftentimes a solo activity, right? You don't. It's not like music, it's not like a band. You're kind of alone. You do it by yourself because what you're doing is you're chasing your curiosities and whatever piques your interest in that moment. But sharing photography makes it more fun. And you would know this if you've ever been to a local photo meetup or you've gone to a workshop before or you've been in an online community, like the beginner photography podcast community on Facebook, right? It is. It's a great place because, well, I like weird things, right? And having other people to talk to about the weird things that I like is. Is fun. It makes me feel normal. Suddenly. I'm not weird, right? I go to my wife and I talk to her about f stops, I talk to her about shutter angle, I talk to her about diffraction of lenses, and she's just her eyes are going to be glazed over. But when I talk to another photographer who's also interested about those things, we can have a fun conversation and you can just really develop your passion for this thing that you love along with somebody else who also loves it as well. Right? Having somebody where you can share your wins with them, your struggles, these experiments with you. Realize that you're not alone and that in and of itself is fun. So as I mentioned, we have the beginner photography podcast Facebook community and that is a great place to get started. If you're brand new to photography and you don't feel like you're ready to join a local photo club or a meetup or go to a workshop, that is a great place to join because you know that you're not going to be grilled for your photography like you can be in so many other photo groups where there's people of, you know, just a vast range of skill in photography. And nobody wants to be the person who shares a photo that they really enjoy because it was fun to shoot. And then they just get, you know, grilled by people who are going to, you know, break down every technical element that is wrong with the photo. That's never fun. So again, the beginner photography podcast Facebook community is a great place to do that. And you can join, if you're not already, by heading over to beginnerphotopod.com group. So I hope to see you there. Me personally, in my life, I'm. I've been moving a lot more towards in person events. We did our first beginner photography podcast workshop earlier this year and it was incredible. I loved every single moment of it. And in fact, next week I'm not hosting a workshop, but here, locally there is going to be a meetup just for photographers who shoot film. Right. It's just analog photographers. And I'm going to be going to that. Why? Because it's fun to talk about something that you enjoy with other people who enjoy it too. And that is it. That is the only reason I'm going. I'm not going because I directly have some sort of struggle that I'm hoping to get help with. But by being around other people who shoot something similar, or maybe not even something similar, they just also shoot. I may see a photo, I may overhear somebody talk about a technique or an approach that may change the way that I see and shoot film. Because you don't know what you don't know. So you have to be exposed to these things to know more things. But Again, I'm not going for, for that element. I'm going simply for the people and the community. That's it. And lastly here, the sixth, sixth thing that I got on my list to make photography more fun is to learn in layers. That sounds very complicated. Layers doesn't sound fun. It sounds very scientific and measured. But there's this quote that I think about all the time, and I believe that it's attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Whether or not it was actually him or not, I can't verify. Even though I did do my fourth grade presentation on Benjamin Franklin of like, you know, our founding fathers still can't, you know, I don't, I don't know the guy, but I do wear a Benjamin Franklin wig pretty well. Anyway, the quote goes, tell me. And I forget, show me. And I remember, involve me. And I understand that right there is photography in a nutshell. If that's not life in a nutshell, that is definitely photography in a nutshell. Where you're at in your stage of photography, maybe you hear about something like back button focus, and it sounds confusing, you don't understand it. So whatever, you're not going to look into it. But maybe later a video pops up on YouTube all about back button focus, and you decide to watch it because you're like, oh, yeah, I heard about that. And then watching it, you think, okay, that does kind of make sense. I kind of get it. But I obviously don't understand how to implement it and use it and why I would use this over just pressing the shutter button to lock in focus. But then you decide, well, I'm going to give it a try for myself because here's instructions right here. And then when you actually go to use it in your own camera for your own style of photography, and you see how it works, that is when the light bulb goes off, right? That process of discovery, that is so fun. That is the cornerstone of every course that I've made for you over the years. The course videos itself teach you the concept, and then I give you an exercise to involve you so that you actually understand, right? So that you can go out, you can use your camera, you can use your experiment, you can use your experience, you can use your environment, your surroundings to photograph in a place where you're comfortable. That makes more sense than just having a video of me in some location that you've never been, with a camera that maybe you don't own, showing you how I shoot. I want you to understand how to shoot, and that is what you need in photography. So if you say to yourself, man, I want more of that hands on learning. Then I encourage you to check out my ultimate beginner photography bundle. It is, it's everything. I've bundled everything so that you can go from a beginner who is confused to a photographer who is confident in using your camera, seeing and using light, editing in Lightroom and more. It is designed to help you learn in layers because again, we're going back to that onion example because again, what good is knowledge if you don't know how to actually use it for yourself? So check it out for yourself. It's on sale right now@bounnerphotopod.com bundle or there's a link in the show notes of this episode as well. Again, that's beginnerphotopod.com bundle. Now, if you listen to all these ideas and you're like, yeah, these are great, I understand that there are ways to make photography more fun, but you need just a little extra help on truly understanding what that would look like for yourself. I have a few ideas for you to actually go out and shoot. These are some ideas to spark some fun. Number one, and I've done all of these, right, it's to do a photo scavenger hunt. Make a list. One of the hardest things, but most rewarding things as far as the scavenger hunt in photography goes, is to photograph the Alphabet. Yeah, like photograph just something that has an A. Photograph just something that has a B. Just a C, right? And don't try to like, look for like a restaurant sign that has all the letters. Like, you go out and you find all these things, you know, in nature. You find a door handle and you're like, wow, that kind of looks like an L. If I rotate my camera this way, you see a porthole style window in an old pub and you're like, oh, that's an O right there. Things like that. So difficult to do, but so rewarding. But your list may be something like, you know, a scavenger hunt. It might be something red, it might be a shadow or reflection. You can ask Chad GBT for ideas, you know, like, help create a beginner friendly photo scavenger hunt. Tons of fun. Next, give yourself a time limit to shoot, right? Come up with this idea of like, okay, I'm gonna go somewhere and then I'm gonna have to take 20 photos in 10 minutes. What that does is it forces you to use your instincts in photography rather than, you know, trying to make every single photo perfect. And I think that you'll find when that 10 minute timer goes up, you'll be like, well, actually, there's still a few more photos around here that I want to capture. And you'll, you know, you'll have those creative juices flowing. You'll be good to go. You'll just find yourself, keep shooting. Next is a is an idea that is pretty popular on the Internet to recreate a favorite photo. Maybe this is from your childhood. Maybe this is one of your old photos that you've done. Try to recreate, you know, one of these old photos that you have in your life. It could be a painting as well. Something that forces you to look at an image and then break down in front of you how to rebuild it to capture it in a similar way. When you have to think about things like composition, posing, lighting the background that you have again, again, it can be challenging, but it can also be really, really rewarding when you get it done. So there you go. There's three quick ideas for you to actually go out and start shooting right now that are gonna make photography more fun. Because again, at the end of the day, fun is what keeps us shooting. And the more that we shoot, the better we get, right? If photography has started to feel like homework for you, then try one of these ideas this week, right? Bring back and I promise you that the growth will naturally just happen. That's how it works. The more you shoot, the better you get. I've said this, and I would love to hear from you about what you are doing to make photography fun again. So feel free to come share it in the beginner photography podcast community again@bounnerphotopod.com group. And if you want to take that fun and turn it into real growth, don't forget to check out the Ultimate Photography Education bundle, which is the fastest way to go from being frustrated with your camera, being frustrated with your camera settings, to being confident with a camera in your hand. And you can find that over@bounnerphotopod.com bundle. And that is it. That is all that I got for today photo friends. Remember, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. Go have fun. Thank you for listening to the Beginner Photography podcast. Keep shooting and we'll see you next week.