7 Photography Ideas You Can Do At Home

On a dull and rainy day (like most here in UK) it can be hard to get inspired and come up with ideas to take some great photos. Well allow me to save you the effort – here are 7 photography ideas you can do right now at home.

1. Food photography

We all have to eat – so before you sit down to chow down why not take some photos! The cool thing with food photography is you can do it at home and without any fancy lighting. Some of the best food photographers use natural light and a fill. Nice and simple. The difference being they have food stylist and chefs on hand to make some delicious looking grub!

Now if you aren’t a whizz in the kitchen don’t sweat it. You can take photos of fruit, vegetables, even spices the list is endless here guys!

2. Macro Photography

Don’t have a macro lens? No problem. No matter what lens you have you can still enter the world of macro, it just won’t be true macro.

For the purpose of trying some new photography ideas at home macro is just getting up close and personal with your subject. Whether this is a flower, some coins, jewellery, whatever it doesn’t matter. Just zoom in close, fill the frame with your subject and focus as close as your lens lets you.

You will start to get a feel for how close you can get and will be really surprised at the cool photos you can take even without a dedicated macro lens. You might have a lens that has a macro mode built in, if so great you should be able to focus even closer to your subject then!

3. Time lapse photography

Put simply you take a series of photos at set intervals, say 3 seconds, then combine them altogether to make a video. You can compress a long period of time into a few seconds giving a really cool effect.

There are a couple of things you will need to get started;

• Tripod (or something to rest your camera on).
• Intervalometer (your camera might have this feature built in).
• Some software to put the images together into a video. (link here)
• A camera with full manual control.

Set your camera up on the tripod, get a pleasing composition and let it snap away for as long as you like. Then using some software, put the images together and you have a timelapse.

And if you’re thinking, “How can I do this from home?”, here’s a timelapse I shot out of a window at home so it can be done!

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4. Interior photography

If you’re stuck at home – why not take photos of your home? Makes sense right? Now this isn’t always as simple as it sounds. Luckily I’ve shot quite a lot of property so here’s a few tips I’ve picked up a long the way to help get you started.

Tripod – A tripod will make your life a lot easier but if you don’t have one don’t let it stop you taking photos! You will just have to take a lot more care when taking your interior photos.

Light – The interior of a property tends to be darker than the outside, so if you want to see the view out of the window as well as the interior correctly exposed you are going to need to do a bit of HDR, use a bit of fill flash or do a bit of masking in photoshop.

A top tip if using a flash for interiors is to bounce it off the ceiling to get a nice even spread of light. And speaking of flash that leads us onto out next photography idea to try at home.

5. Flash photography

Flash guns are so cheap now it would be rude not to get one. Seriously using a flash will open up a whole new world of photography.

Flashes can be picked up dirt cheap on ebay…

You will be transported to a place that you only thought possible in magazines, studios and hollywood movies. That is if you get it right and learn the right techniques.

Just remember, flash sync speed – this is the fasted shutter speed you can set before you will see the dreaded black bars of the shutter being captured. Most DSLRs max sync speed is between 1/160th and 1/250th. But be sure to check out what the setting is for your camera.

6. Product Photography

Now I’m sure you like me have quite literally hundreds of products lying around your home. So why not have a bash at some product photography.

You might want to pick a product that isn’t too large, place it on a nice clean background and then shoot. When it comes to lighting you could either use some natural light either with or without some sort of diffuser or if you have a flash gun you might want to experiment with that.

Underneath there’s a video I made showing you some easy ways to take product photos – and with any camera!

So whether you have a DSLR, point and shoot or just a camera phone you can still try your hand at some product photography today!

7. Wildlife Photography

So you’re stuck at home itching to take some wildlife photos (we’ve all been there), there’s no wildlife to be seen in your house, except from the occasional spider and who wants to take a picture of that?!

If you’re lucky enough to have a garden why not set yourself up near a window and see if you can capture some birds that land? Or capture a few flying through the air in flight. You might want to use a telephoto lens for this as it may be difficult to get close enough with the kit lens that came with your camera.

Remember to select the centre autofocus point, set your cameras autofocus to continuous, the drive mode to high speed and keep your shutter speeds up high to freeze the action – birds are very fast movers!

If you need some help understanding shutter speed here’s a link to find out everything you need to know.

Just be patient, keep shooting and you will have some great wildlife photos right from the comfort of your home!

Here’s the video I made for this blog post…