Sunday I started my first exercise: Get pickier.

Head out with your camera for an hour and force yourself to shoot a hundred frames – push yourself creatively. [...] But now do the opposite. Go out and shoot only 3 frames. [...] Shoot less, not more. [...] Would you put this on your wall? No? Delete it. Try again.

So I went out and tried to shoot those hundred pictures in the hour I was given. Unfortunately I just made it to just 75. However, I saw a lot of things in my immediate neighborhood, that I haven’t notice before – the first one shown below, being literally within 100 meters from my flat.

I learned to pay attention to details in my surroundings. As a side effect, I lost the feeling for direction, but that did not matter. It was a Sunday, not raining and I had plenty of time (60 minutes for this exercise to be precise). The next thing I learned is it can be quite rewarding to change your position to get a good shot.

The above message I discovered in a house entrance. It dawned on me, that some of the most interesting discoveries are made in backyards, house entrances and hallways, where more or less blessed street artists are not disturbed by alerted neighbors or (being in Munich) the police. This leads me to one of my last pictures of my 60 minute stint. It’s a very elaborate piece of graffiti art, most likely with consent of the house owner.

This pretty much sums up my first hour. The lesson was that I generally overlook so much, that when I actively focus on taking notice of my surroundings, I get a lot out of it.

My second hour was supposed to help me focus on getting a shot right. So I went through Munich trying to find a shot, that was worth putting effort in it. And here’s the kicker: When you are looking for that one shot, it becomes very hard to find. In the end I came up with one shot:

It’s taken in Munich’s Fünf Höfe and it shows the inside view of an art installation of Olafur Eliasson. I played a lot with different exposures, trying to get the symmetry right until I came up with the shot. It’s highly overexposed and even used some flash. I’m pretty satisfied with the end result, which leaves me looking forward to next week’s assignment: contrasts.