There’s always that one unremarkable place near where you live. A street corner you pass without thinking. A park bench under a tree. An alley behind a strip mall. You’ve walked by it hundreds of times and never once thought to photograph it. The first time you do, the image will probably be forgettable. The tenth time will change how you see everything.
Most photographers chase new locations like they’re collecting stamps, believing that extraordinary images require extraordinary places. We scroll through social media seeing photos from Iceland, Japan, and Patagonia, and convince ourselves that our local environment could never yield anything worth sharing. This mentality is limiting and fundamentally wrong about what makes photography powerful.
Here’s a challenge that will completely change how you see: choose one location within easy reach of your home and photograph it ten separate times over the next few months. Not ten different compositions in one afternoon, but ten distinct visits where you force yourself to create a new image each time. The location should be ordinary, maybe even boring. A street corner you pass daily. The park three blocks from your house. Your own backyard. The less inherently photogenic, the better.
This exercise strips away novelty. When you visit a new place, half the work is already done. The unfamiliar architecture, the different quality of light, the exotic context all contribute to making your images feel fresh. Remove that variable, and suddenly you’re forced to find creativity in observation, timing, and perspective. That’s where real growth happens.
The beauty of ten visits is that it’s enough to push you past the obvious without becoming overwhelming. Three visits isn’t sufficient because you haven’t exhausted the easy approaches yet. Twenty visits starts to feel like an unreasonable commitment that most people won’t complete. Ten sits in the sweet spot where you’ll struggle, adapt, and ultimately discover something fundamental about how you see.
The First Three Visits: Exhausting the Obvious
Your first visit follows a predictable pattern. You walk around, looking for compositions that feel natural. You find the best angles, shoot during decent light, and leave feeling satisfied. You might get one or two images you like. This is photography in its most comfortable form.
The second visit forces a small shift. You can’t repeat exactly what you did before, so you start looking for variations. Maybe you change your time of day slightly. Get lower to the ground. Notice a detail you overlooked. The images might not feel dramatically different, but you’re thinking more intentionally about your choices.
By the third visit, frustration creeps in. You’ve shot the obvious compositions. Standing there with your camera, you might genuinely wonder if there’s anything left to photograph. This moment of doubt is actually progress. It means you’re bumping up against the limitations of your habitual way of seeing. That’s exactly where growth begins.
Visits Four Through Six: Learning to See Light
Once the obvious compositions are exhausted, you stop looking at the location as a static subject and start seeing it as a stage where light performs. This is when the exercise becomes genuinely educational. The corner that looked flat in midday sun transforms during golden hour, with long shadows creating depth. The building facade that seemed dull under overcast skies becomes graphic and clean, the even light revealing textures without harsh shadows.
Weather stops being an obstacle and becomes a creative variable. Visit after a rainstorm and discover reflections in puddles that double your compositional options. Shoot on a foggy morning and watch your familiar location become mysterious. Go out during overcast conditions and find that soft light makes colors more saturated and allows you to shoot at any time without harsh shadows. Each weather condition offers distinct creative possibilities.
The progression through different lighting conditions teaches you something no book can convey: an intuitive understanding of how light direction, quality, and color temperature affect mood and visual impact. You start predicting how a location will look under different conditions. You begin checking weather forecasts and sun position apps not to avoid bad conditions but to plan for specific effects. Light becomes a tool you actively work with.
Visits Seven Through Ten: Breaking Your Own Rules
By visit seven, you’ve shot the location in different light, different weather, and from various conventional angles. Now you need to actively push against your own habits. If you’ve been shooting everything at eye level, get on the ground or find elevated positions. If you’ve been using a standard focal length, switch to something dramatically different. If you’ve been keeping people out of your frames, wait for someone to walk through and incorporate them.
The constraints force creative problem solving. You start looking for reflections, shooting through objects, finding frames within the frame, using foreground elements to add depth, incorporating motion blur, trying long exposures, experimenting with intentional camera movement. These aren’t gimmicks. They’re fundamental techniques that become part of your visual vocabulary because you needed them to keep finding new images in a familiar place.
You also begin noticing patterns invisible during early visits. That street corner is empty at seven in the morning but floods with people during evening rush hour. The light hits a particular wall only in winter when the sun’s angle is lower. Trees that were bare in your first visits are now full of leaves, completely changing the location’s character. These observations about timing, seasons, and human patterns become insights you carry into all your photography.
By visit ten, something remarkable happens. You stop thinking about the location at all. You’re not trying to capture “this specific park” or “that particular corner.” You’re simply seeing opportunities for images, responding to light, noticing moments, and trusting your instincts. The location has become irrelevant. That’s the entire point.
Choosing Your Location: Boring Is Better
The temptation is to choose somewhere at least moderately interesting for this exercise. Resist that impulse. The more ordinary and unremarkable your location, the more you’ll learn. A dramatic overlook or a historically significant building gives you too much to work with. You’ll keep mining the inherent interest of the place rather than developing your ability to find interest anywhere.
Look for locations that are easily accessible so weather, motivation, or scheduling won’t become excuses for not completing the exercise. Ideally, it should be somewhere you can reach within ten or fifteen minutes from home. This convenience is crucial because the point is to return repeatedly, and if getting there requires significant planning or travel time, you’re less likely to follow through. A neighborhood park you can walk to beats a beautiful location an hour away.
Consider safety and permission. You’ll be visiting this spot ten times over potentially several months, at different times of day and in different weather. Make sure it’s somewhere you feel comfortable being alone with camera gear. If it’s private property, ensure you have permission or that it’s genuinely public space. Getting questioned or asked to leave will kill your motivation to return.
The location should offer some variety in how you can approach it, even if that variety isn’t immediately obvious. A completely empty parking lot might be too minimal, while a complex botanical garden might offer too much diversity. Something in between works best. A street corner with buildings, sidewalk, street, maybe a tree or two. A section of park with a path, some grass, whatever natural elements exist. An alley with walls, dumpsters, utility infrastructure. These seemingly mundane spaces contain more photographic potential than you currently see.
Documenting Your Progress: The Power of Comparison
Keep notes during this exercise, even if they’re brief. After each visit, write down what time you shot, what the weather was like, what you tried that was different from previous visits, and what you learned or noticed. These notes serve two purposes. First, they help you avoid accidentally repeating the same approach. Second, they create a record of your thought process that becomes valuable when you review the entire series.
More importantly, keep all ten final images from each visit together in a dedicated folder or collection. Don’t just save your single favorite from the entire exercise. The learning comes from seeing the progression, understanding how you approached the same space differently each time, and recognizing the evolution in your vision. When you lay all ten images side by side, the variety you extracted from one location becomes undeniable evidence of your growing ability to see photographically.
The comparison also reveals your tendencies and preferences. You might discover that you naturally gravitate toward tight, detailed compositions or that you prefer environmental wide shots. Maybe you’re drawn to human elements or you consistently eliminate people from frames. Perhaps you favor high contrast black and white or you’re pulled toward subtle color relationships. These patterns aren’t good or bad, they’re clues about your emerging style and the kind of photographer you’re becoming.
Share your progression if you’re comfortable doing so. Post your ten images as a series on social media or a photography forum, explaining the exercise and what you learned. The act of articulating your experience reinforces the lessons, and the feedback you receive often highlights aspects of your growth that you didn’t recognize yourself. Other photographers seeing your work might be inspired to try the exercise themselves, and their different approaches to the same challenge can expand your understanding even further.
What This Exercise Teaches You About All Photography
Once you’ve extracted ten distinct images from somewhere ordinary, you stop seeing locations as the primary variable in creating compelling work. You recognize that the photographer’s vision, timing, and technical choices matter far more than the inherent interest of the subject.
This realization is liberating. You no longer need exotic destinations or special access to create work you’re proud of. The pressure to constantly seek new locations, to travel to photogenic places, to find extraordinary subjects diminishes completely. Your everyday environment becomes rich with possibility.
The exercise also builds visual confidence that’s hard to develop any other way. When you’re forced to return to the same place repeatedly, you can’t blame the location if your images aren’t working. You have to problem solve, try different approaches, and persist through frustration. This persistence builds creative resilience. You learn that hitting a wall doesn’t mean you’re out of ideas. It means you need to think differently.
Perhaps most valuably, this exercise teaches patience and sustained attention. In an era of infinite scroll and constant novelty, returning to one place again and again runs counter to how we’re conditioned to consume and create. It forces you to slow down, to look more carefully, to notice subtle changes and small details. This capacity for sustained, patient observation makes you not just a better photographer but a more attentive person.
Beyond the Exercise: Making It a Practice
Some photographers complete this exercise once and internalize the lesson. Others find it so valuable that it becomes an ongoing practice. They choose a new location every few months and repeat the process, each time discovering new aspects of their vision and new techniques for seeing. The exercise never gets easier, but the growth it produces never stops either.
You might also find that certain locations deserve more than ten visits. If you connect deeply with a place during this exercise, there’s no rule saying you have to stop at ten. Some photographers return to the same location for years, creating extensive bodies of work that document not just the place but their own evolution as artists. The constraint remains valuable no matter how long you maintain it.
The discipline of returning repeatedly to photograph one location can also inspire longer-term projects. You might decide to document seasonal changes over a full year. You could explore how a neighborhood evolves during different times of day. You might focus on how weather transforms familiar spaces. These extended projects often produce the most personally meaningful work because they require sustained commitment and attention.
Whether you do this exercise once or make it a regular practice, the fundamental lesson remains the same. Photography isn’t about finding extraordinary subjects. It’s about seeing extraordinarily. The camera is a tool for attention, and attention is a skill you can develop through deliberate practice. Shooting the same location ten times is simply one very effective way to build that skill.
Start Tomorrow
You don’t need to plan extensively or find the perfect location to begin. Choose somewhere ordinary that you can easily access and go there tomorrow. Spend thirty minutes, shoot whatever speaks to you, and don’t overthink it. That’s visit one.
Put it on your calendar to return in a few days. Then again. Before you know it, you’ll be halfway through, and the lessons will already be reshaping how you see.
The transformation won’t happen all at once. You won’t finish visit ten and suddenly become a completely different photographer. But when you look back at where you started and compare it to where you ended, the growth will be undeniable. You’ll see the same location ten different ways, and in doing so, you’ll prove to yourself that extraordinary images don’t require extraordinary places. They require vision, attention, and the willingness to see deeply rather than broadly.
Stop waiting for the perfect trip, the ideal location, or the most photogenic subject. Pick a boring location, commit to ten visits, and discover what you’re capable of seeing when you have nowhere else to look.
