Hey everyone! So for today’s blog post, I want to talk about a 24-shot challenge that I did with Cat of Cat Warren Photo and Black male model, Donald Loum. I actually got this idea from the YouTube video that fellow photographer Derrel Ho-Shing. We ended up completing this challenge in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, CA.

So we decided to meet up relatively early (around 7:00AM) just so we could avoid running into too many people. North Park can get crowded as it is a touristy neighborhood. We decided to try this challenge in one of the alleys that has graffiti walls. I have been to North Park to shoot a couple of times so I kinda had an idea of where I wanted to shoot before we arrived.

The rules of the challenge were pretty simple…we only had 24 shots to try and get some good images. The 24 shots included any shots we took to try and get our settings correct. Luckily, I shoot with the Sony A7III so I can use the live view feature which allows me to see what an image will look like straight out of camera (without a flash). I did want to use a flash for this challenge so I still had to fumble with the settings a bit once I incorporated that, but at least I knew my ambient light was correct.

Cat and I took turns photographing Don. I went first and took ten images…of the initial ten over half of them were useable. Then Cat went and captured her ten. Cat actually was shooting with the natural light (i.e., not using flash) for her set of images. Here are some of my images below.

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I tried to get some walking images of Donald, but I could not get my life together to get them how I liked them with the flash. Overall, out of the 24 shots that I took, I liked 15 of them…so that’s over half of the images. Not too bad if I say so myself. If I do this challenge again, I think I want to do it in a more challenging setting (i.e., with harsher light or an “ugly” background).

I also filmed a YouTube video of this challenge so please check it out below!