2022 Photography Ideas #20 Use a Compact Camera for a Day

Try taking photos for a day with a compact camera or smartphone, putting all the care into each image as you would with a DSLR. Use your tripod or lighting setup as normal, and same with post-processing. (Most flashes can be set to go off when they detect another flash, including the pop-up of a point-and-shoot.)

In this case, the results definitely won’t have the same pixel-level quality as from your main kit. But this exercise will bring out a lot of creativity, too. You can’t rely on shooting portraits with a shallow depth of field, so you need to be more careful about backgrounds and lighting. For landscape photography, you’ll have much less dynamic range, so you need to wait until the sky and foreground have balanced light, or else shoot bracketed exposures to blend.

No matter what workarounds you use, you’ll come away with a better sense of how to push your camera’s limitations – and a stronger argument for why the camera doesn’t really matter in the first place.