A photo quest with every walk
RLQuest hands you photo quests, walks and places each morning and checks the photo itself. For iPhone and Android.
A photo walk with no theme turns into a walk with a camera: you shoot the obvious things, come home with forty pictures and keep two. A theme does the opposite. It narrows what you're allowed to look at, and the narrowing is what makes you see. The six themes below each fit a single walk of an hour or so, with a phone camera and no other equipment.
This page is about themes for a walk, not a checklist; the photo scavenger hunt lists for colors, textures and odd things have their own page. Here each theme comes with a handful of shots to aim for, a note on when it works best, and one shot that's harder than it looks.
Walk looking for lines rather than things: the diagonal of a ramp, the curve of a curb, two rails meeting in the distance. Shots to aim for: a single strong diagonal running through the frame; a long corridor, avenue or street shot from dead center so the lines converge; a curve that carries the eye out of the picture; two lines crossing at a sharp angle. Best in flat, even light, when no shadow is competing with the line. The hard one: scaffolding shot straight on, so that it stops being a building and becomes a grid.
Nobody is in these photos, but somebody was. A handrail worn pale exactly where hands grip it. A crossing button polished shiny by thousands of fingers. Four screw holes in a rectangle where a sign used to hang. A path worn into the grass where the planners guessed wrong. The dark mark on a wall at shoulder height where something rubs against it every day. This theme works anywhere people have been passing for more than a decade, so older streets and stations give more than new developments. The hard one: something repaired instead of replaced, a taped sign, a welded railing, a patched wall, photographed so that the decision to mend it is the subject.
Towns are covered in text nobody reads. Shoot one large letter filling the frame. The plain gray back of a road sign, bolts and all. A faded painted advertisement for a store that closed fifty years ago. A price written by hand on a sign at a market or farm stand. A house with a name instead of a number. A sign where part of the text has worn away so that what's left spells something new. Overcast days are good for this: no glare on the metal and no shadows across the letters. The hard one: lettering reflected in a window or a puddle, mirrored and reversed, close enough that you can almost read it.
Keep the camera anywhere except eye level for the whole walk. Straight down at the ground beneath your feet, phone flat. From the ground, lens almost on the sidewalk, pointing up. At waist height, which is how a dog or a small child sees the street. Straight up between buildings, under a tree, in a stairwell. From directly above a staircase, phone held out over the edge. It feels awkward for the first ten minutes and then stops. The hard one: a round object shot so exactly head-on that it stays a circle and doesn't turn into an oval.
A minimalism walk. Every photo may contain two things and nothing else: a bench and its shadow, a post and a wire, a leaf and a drain. Then try one thing on a large plain surface, a single mark on a wall. Then a nearly empty scene with one detail. Fog, snow, blank walls and early Sunday mornings make this easier; a busy market makes it nearly impossible, which is its own kind of fun. The hard one: a frame that's almost nothing and still holds together. Leaving out is harder than adding.
This one is a theme across a day rather than a single walk. Pick a short loop, ten or fifteen minutes, and walk it three times: in the first hour after sunrise, at midday when shadows are shortest, and in the half hour after sunset when the streetlights are on and the sky isn't black yet. Photograph the same six spots each time. Morning light rakes across every texture; noon flattens everything and cuts hard-edged shadows; the blue hour turns the same street into a different town. Line the three sets up afterward. The hard one: the midday shot. It's the light everybody avoids, and finding something that works in it is the point.
| Theme | Works best | The hard shot |
|---|---|---|
| Lines | Flat, even light | Scaffolding as a pure grid |
| Traces of people | Older streets, stations | A repair as the subject |
| Lettering and numbers | Overcast days | Reversed text in a reflection |
| From a different height | Anywhere; it needs nerve, not light | A circle that stays a circle |
| Only two things | Fog, snow, empty mornings | Almost nothing, still a picture |
| The same route, three times | A clear day with a sunset | Making midday light work |
Pick the theme before you leave, not on the way; otherwise you'll choose whatever you've already walked past. Set a time limit, an hour is plenty, and a number, eight to twelve frames. Shoot fewer pictures and look longer at each thing before you raise the phone. Leave strangers out of the frame entirely; nothing here needs a person in it. And don't crop or stage your way out of a hard shot. The miss is information about where to stand next time.
After a few weeks you'll have run all six themes and started inventing your own, which is the point. If you'd rather be handed one, that's what the photo quests in RLQuest do. Each morning the app picks three to ten quests from a library of more than 2,700, and the photo ones read like the shots above: a diagonal through the frame, a shadow longer than the thing casting it, a handrail worn smooth, a picture with only two things in it. The app looks at the photo, checks it against the task and gives an honest no when it doesn't match. Photos are checked and then discarded; they never sit on a server. Alongside the photo quests are walking quests, quests tied to the time of day and quests to real places, and every walk fills in a hexagon map of where you've been.
It's free to download for iPhone and Android, with a Premium subscription that adds more quests per day. The six themes above will carry you through six walks. After that, the app has the seventh.
RLQuest hands you photo quests, walks and places each morning and checks the photo itself. For iPhone and Android.