One of the bugabears of amateur photographers is a stalled imagination. What should I take a picture of? Yet we all live in a whirlwind of activity that cries out to be recognized and recorded, perhaps even to be immortalized in a framed print in a gallery. A series showing the daily challenges faced by a garage mechanic, the tension between the routine quiet waiting and the sudden alarms in a fire house, the activity in a theater group as they prepare a new production, a record of all the local bridges, etc., etc. You don't have to travel to find subject matter. It's in your home or outside your front door.

Nice work on the car components, Lowkick! In a way, they confirm my suggestion that a shot or two of today's cars could be interesting 20 or 30 or 40 years from now (as a small part of a picture story of a family reunion). But I have to admit today's hulking SUVs and pickup trucks lack the individuality of cars from the 1950s and '60s. We have no idea what the average car will look like in 2040 or 2050, or what our mode of transportation will be, so the survivors of that hypothetical family reunion might find our quaint vehicles amusing as well as historical.

Which causes me to ponder whether the current electronic phase of photography is a dangerous development for its future. The evolution of computers has resulted in some problems in accessing stored data, because if the files were not transferred from one level of storage (say, punched cards or reel-to-reel) they can be several generations removed from access. This might happen to electronic media currently used to store photographs. My 65-year-old negatives can still be printed or even uploaded into my computer. But will today's memory cards be equally accessible in computers 65 years from now?

Ther is another basic point to keep in mind when working your way through a self-imposed "assignment: don't forget the vertical composition. Unless you are using a square-format camera (say, 2-1/4" x 2-1/4"), chances are you will tend to compose in the horizontal or "landscape" position because it's easier to hold the camera that way. Every once in a while, try holding the camera upright, in the vertical or "portrait" position and see how it changes your perception of the subject. Remember that magazine covers are vertical. Good luck.

I'd like to add another couple of suggestions. First, check out a library book on the rules of composition, memorize them, then start breaking them deliberately. Try organizing each photo foray as if it was a magazine assignment: decide what the "story" is, take a couple of long "overall" shots, some medium shots, some closeups, even some semi-macro shots, and finally an "arty" or "sexy" shot. For example, if you're "covering" your family reunion, shoot a view of all the cars in the parking lot (think of how interesting that will be 20 or 30 years later), closeups of individual license plates to show how far some have come, the oldest and youngest person together, the oldest and youngest married couple, group shots of each individual family, the cooks who prepared the meal, closeups of some of the dishes, if games are played, look for antics, show the winners (including a pie eating contest), sleeping babies, sleeping elders ...you get the picture (I hope). Everybody will want a copy of that album.

Another thing I use is to review my shots of years past to note what I could have done better, criticizing my own work with the knowledge I've picked up in the meantime. We didn't have the comraderie of the Internet or the time to attend scheduled meetings of clubs because my photo assignments were too demanding.

I wish I had been able to take a detailed darkroom course when I got into photography back in the mid-1940s (one of my "mates" in the Army Air Force in Germany in 1945-46 was Peter Gowland, who trained at the AAF photo school at Lowry AirForce Base in Colorado, but I was an artist and sometime photographer at the time,so I missed out on darkroom techniques). Later at college (GI Bill) I studied
Advertising Design and won a prize in the 1951 LIFE magazine contest for young photographers. But I was still basically an amateur, until I bit the bullet and became an assignment photographer, cruising the nation for industrial advertising clients. I rarely got into a darkroom -- in fact, I rarely saw my photos except when I opened a magazine and ran across them in ads (or occasionally on an editorial page). I simply mailed my films back to the office and moved on to the next asignment, which usually lasted only a few hours before I jumped on the next plane.
It was very exciting but I don't recommend it as a career, especially with today's airport restrictions.