Photography is a wonderful way to waste time. You can even spend money doing so. Here are some great time-frittering ideas, not all of them free:
1. Develop a healthy obsession with dust on your sensor. Buy a special magnifying thingie to fit in place of your lens. Then you can spend hours gazing through it, trying to spot the specks. You never know, a few more motes may even fall into your camera while you’re peering through the magnifier.
2. Feed your dust obsession. Buy a changing bag that makes it look as if you’re handling radioactive waste every time you swap lenses. Don’t worry if your subject swims/runs/walks/flies/hops/crawls/slithers/drifts/blows or grows away whilst you are changing lenses. At least you haven’t got dust in your camera …
3. … unless you forgot to vacuum-clean your lovely lens-changing bag after you last used it.
4. Is your camera a Nikon? Join a photographic forum to argue that it’s way, way better than a Canon. And don’t let those Canon idiots put you down. Keep arguing.
5. Is your camera a Canon? Join a photographic forum to argue that it’s way, way better than a Nikon. And don’t let those Nikon idiots put you down. Keep arguing.
6. Is your camera a Panasonic? A Sony? A Fuji? A Leica? Join a photographic forum to argue …
7. Choose one of your photographs … you have taken some in between all that dust-busting and arguing, haven’t you? … any one will do. Add an eye-catching, judge-stunning border and enter it for a photographic competition. Be sure to put © Your Name somewhere at the bottom of the picture too (preferably in a fancy font). Artists always sign their work. And you never know when a judge is going to try to pinch it.
8. Better still, enter a rights-grabbing photo competition where the organisers legally steal your work.
9. Buy the cheapest lenses you can find. After all, lenses are just lumps of glass, aren’t they? It’s the camera, with its logo, that’s important. Here’s a beauty. Looks big and professional, too.
10. Join Flickr and leave breathless comments (Wow! That is sooooooooo coooooooool! Amazing!!!!!!!!! Brilliant!) on loads of indifferent photographs in the hope that people will respond to your photos in the same way.
11. Shoot one-handed to look cool, like the photogs in the adverts.
12. Use your camera’s dinky little built-in flash to take photographs of the action at rock concerts, football matches, athletic meets and other places. The flash won’t be powerful enough to light up the entire stadium but, what the hell, we’re into time-wasting here.
13. Hand your camera to others, to take photos of you posing in front of tourist attractions. Better still, hand your camera to a complete stranger and ask him/her to photograph you. This can also be equipment-wasting – when the stranger runs off still clutching it.
14. Shoot JPEG files. RAW is for wimps who can’t shoot a photo right first time and are afraid of making mistakes. Anyway, RAW files are huge and fill up your memory card.
15. Spend hours working with an image editing program to add some fancy painterly textures to your photographs – brush swirls, canvassy looks and all that stylish stuff. After all, painting’s classy, isn’t it? Photography’s just pushing a button. (You could even enter the resulting work of art for a competition – see Nos. 7. and 8.)
There you go … a bunch of ideas for the weekends or long dark winter evenings.
Happy photo frittering!
And you say …