I am looking for structured assignments which will help me improve my photography. I’m an experienced enthusiast - over 20 years of shooting - but I feel a bit stale recently like I’ve not learned anything new or looked at anything differently. Is there any assignment you have done which you felt moved the dial for you?
The first time I had to shoot a job on pure JPEG, no editing. Had to bake in the exposure and white balance manually and nail it as the photos were going right to publishing straight out of camera.
I challenge anyone to go shoot full manual(including white balance) in JPEG and find how good of a photographer you actually are.
It’s not really fun to find out all the times you were “shooting for post” you were actually using RAW as a crutch to mask bad fundamentals(as I found out), but it’s a powerful lesson.