52 Assignments: Experimental Photography is a mission brief, a photographic workshop, a personalised journal, and an anarchic guide to putting the creativity back into your photography. It is filled with prompts and projects, nudges and sparks, innovations and inspirations, and - most importantly - experiments in shooting, processing, and printing, to help you kick your photographic habits, step out of your comfort zone and create your own collection of experimental work.
The book features 52 colour-coded commissions and concepts with alternative ideas for composing, creating and printing photographic images. You will be briefed to tackle modern uses for traditional film (hacking vintage film cameras, making pinholes, playing with plastic, collecting the filters that inspired Instagram) and traditional uses for digital (multiple exposures, extreme speeds, timed challenges, focus tricks), as well as lo-tech and hi-tech ways to manipulate your prints (staining prints with water, digital effects, photocopy prints, burning photos, printing on flexible surfaces).
The rest of the journal's pages are styled for you to add your own thoughts, notes, lists, Top 10s, technical specifications, quotes, and even sketches and doodles, creating a record of your own 52 photographic assignments. These may be completed weekend by weekend over the course of a year, or dipped into every time you need to bring a new edge or experimental approach to your photography.
1. Losing focus 8
2. Rasterbate 10
3. Drive-by shooting 12
4. Inkjet transfer 14
5. Screen star 18
6. Go off-piste 20
7. Camera tossing 22
8. Reflected reality 24
9. Pan-tastic 26
10. It's a small world 28
11. Cross-processing 30
12. Step & repeat 32
13. Zoom burst 36
14. Wet prints 38
15. Pinhole making 40
16. Pinhole taking 42
17. Bokeh filters 44
18. Freelensing 46
19. Multiple exposures 48
20. Plastic fantastic! 50
21. Redscale 52
22. Joiners #1 54
23. Joiners #2 56
24. Scanner art 58
25. Copy art 60
26. Sprocket shots 62
27. Cloudscapes 66
28. Tea time! 68
29. Burning up 70
30. Rip 'n' stick 72
31. Into the light 74
32. Framing 76
33. $1 ND filter 78
34. Illustrated text 80
35. Dip 'n' dunk color 82
36. TTV 84
37. Textured glass 88
38. Paint with light #1 90
39. Tilt lens 92
40. Chip can macro 94
41. Paint with light #2 96
42. Brenizer method 98
43. Projected images 102
44. Freeze frame 104
45. Laser transfers 106
46. Holgaramas 108
47. Distressed negs 112
48. Paper negs 114
49. Splash of color 118
50. Power of three 120
51. Solargrams 122
52. Shoot soft 124