Chapter 36 — Exercises

History is not a spectator subject here — you learn it by making photographs in conversation with it and by reading images for the lineage they carry. Most of these exercises send you out to shoot in the four recurring locations or ask you to read a Described Photograph and place it on the map you built in this chapter. A phone is a perfect camera for every one of them; that ubiquity is, after all, the punchline of the whole chapter. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those are in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Keep what you shoot — several of these feed your Portfolio and this chapter's "in conversation" Checkpoint.

Part A — Reading the lineage (Read the Frame)

Exercise 36.1 ⭐ — Place four on the map. Re-read this chapter's four gallery Described Photographs (Figures 36.3 Adams, 36.4 Cartier-Bresson, plus the Lange and Avedon descriptions in §36.3). For each, write one sentence naming its movement and its core seeing idea. Then add a second sentence for each naming which of the four decisions (light, moment, frame, focus) carries that image hardest — for instance, the Cartier-Bresson lives and dies on the moment, while the Adams is built on previsualized light and tone. The goal is fluency: you should be able to place any of the four instantly, and say what makes each one work.

Exercise 36.2 ⭐⭐ — Document or art? Find five photographs around you (camera roll, a magazine, a news site, a packaging photo, a print on a wall). For each, place it on the document↔art line from Figure 36.2 and defend the placement in one sentence. Which leaned hardest toward "evidence"? Which toward "expression"? Was any genuinely in the middle?

Exercise 36.3 ⭐⭐ — Reverse-engineer the movement. Find three photographs (yours or others') and, from the image alone, deduce which historical tradition each most resembles — straight/f64, decisive moment, documentary, New Color, Pictorialist, or snapshot. State the two or three visual clues that led you there (sharpness, subject, color, the instant, manipulation).

Exercise 36.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Write a gallery homage. Choose a genuinely famous photograph you admire (find it online; do not reproduce it). Write a full Described Photograph of it using the six fields, and then add a seventh line placing it in this chapter's map of movements. Be specific enough that a reader could picture it and name its lineage without seeing it.

Part B — Shooting in conversation with history (Shoot This / Recreate It)

Exercise 36.5 ⭐ — Shoot like it's 1855. Repeat the in-chapter assignment from §36.1: go to the kitchen window with one ordinary subject and allow yourself exactly one frame. Do all your seeing — light, moment, frame, focus — before you press. Keep the single deliberate frame and write one sentence on what the constraint made you notice.

Exercise 36.6 ⭐⭐ — An f/64 landscape. Recreate the spirit of Figure 36.3 at the park or trail location. Previsualize: before you raise the camera, look at the scene and decide where the deep shadows and bright highlights should fall — say it out loud ("those trees go to near-black but keep detail; that lit rock face goes bright but doesn't blow") (Chapter 8's Zone thinking). Use a small aperture (f/11–f/16) for front-to-back sharpness, find raking low light that rakes texture into relief, and aim for the full tonal range from true black to clean white. Shoot 15 frames as the light shifts; keep the one that most matches the print you previsualized — the one that feels planned rather than lucky. Write one sentence comparing what you imagined to what you got.

Exercise 36.7 ⭐⭐ — A decisive moment. Recreate the spirit of Figure 36.4 at the busy intersection or market. First find the stage: a spot where the geometry is already strong but empty (a doorway, a crosswalk, a puddle with a reflection). Pre-focus to that spot (zone focusing, Chapter 17), stand back where you are unobtrusive, and wait, readied, for a figure or gesture to complete the frame. The discipline is to not shoot the people who don't complete it — let them pass. Review nothing on the screen while you work (no chimping); keep your eyes on the street. Shoot for 20 minutes; you may make 30 frames or 3. Keep the 1 where form and meaning truly align, and note how many "almost" frames you let go to get it.

Exercise 36.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — A New Color study. Go to the intersection or market with color as the subject (a direct descendant of your Chapter 7 red-against-grey study). Hunt the saturated ordinary — an awning, a sign, neon in a puddle, the poetry of a gas station at dusk. Shoot 20 frames in which the color, not the object, is the point. Keep 3 and write why the color does the work in each.

Exercise 36.9 ⭐⭐ — A snapshot, on purpose. Make a deliberate "snapshot": the casual, unposed, artless-looking frame of ordinary life that artists later embraced as a style. Shoot your own ordinary Tuesday — the kitchen at breakfast, the bus stop, the dog — with the snapshot's directness. The challenge is to make artlessness feel honest rather than careless. Keep 2.

Exercise 36.10 ⭐⭐⭐ — A studio subtraction. Recreate the spirit of the Avedon white-seamless homage (§36.3) with whatever you have: a person (with consent) or even an object, against the plainest, brightest background you can improvise (a white wall, a sheet by the window). The whole exercise is removal: take away the room, the landscape, the props, the context, until nothing remains but the subject and the light. Frame close — closer than feels comfortable. Let the soft window light (Chapter 13) and the person be the entire photograph. Keep 1; write what the subtraction concentrated — what you noticed about the subject once everything else was gone. Compare the feeling to Lange's documentary subtraction (Chapter 1's case study): same move, opposite setting.

Part C — Settings and seeing across the eras (Settings Drill / Five Conditions)

Exercise 36.11 ⭐⭐ — The film-discipline drill. For a full shooting session, set yourself a hard limit of 36 frames and review nothing until you get home (no chimping). At home, lay out all 36. How many are keepers? Write a paragraph: did the scarcity change how you composed and waited, compared with your normal frictionless shooting? This is §36.5's lesson made physical.

Exercise 36.12 ⭐⭐ — Five movements, one subject. Pick one subject in one location and photograph it five ways, each channeling a different tradition: (1) f/64 — sharp, planned, full tonal range; (2) Pictorialist — soft, atmospheric, dreamy (shoot through something, or into haze); (3) decisive moment — wait for an instant of life near it; (4) New Color — saturated, color-led; (5) snapshot — casual and direct. Self-select the best 2 and explain why those traditions suited this subject.

Exercise 36.13 ⭐⭐ — Write the exposure for an era. For each scenario, write a starting exposure (aperture / shutter / ISO) and explain the trade-off, then say what the film-era photographer's main constraint would have been: (a) an f/64-style sharp landscape in low sun; (b) a decisive-moment street frame in flat midday light; (c) a dim café interior. (Chapters 3, 16, 17 inform these.)

Exercise 36.14 ⭐⭐⭐ — The feed vs. the wall. Repeat the in-chapter §36.6 assignment as a graded pair: of one subject in one location, make a feed photograph (built to stop a thumb — instantly legible, bold) and a wall photograph (built to reward slow looking — quiet, considered). Keep both. Write a short critique of how the two intentions changed each of the four decisions.

Part D — Fix the Photo (diagnose and re-shoot)

Exercise 36.15 ⭐⭐ — Fix the "everything-on-auto" landscape. A described failed shot: a landscape made on a phone, full auto, at noon, handheld and quickly — flat light, a tilted horizon dead-center, a bright blown sky, a power line crossing the frame, soft because the photo- grapher kept moving. Diagnose it against the four decisions and the f/64 ideal, then prescribe the specific re-shoot (time of day, exposure, framing, what to exclude). You may not blame the camera.

Exercise 36.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Fix the "sprayed" street sequence. A described failure: 200 frames of a busy crosswalk, fired in bursts, chimping between each — and not one frame where a figure and the geometry align, because the photographer was watching the screen, not the street. Diagnose what went wrong (the digital-era vice from §36.5) and prescribe a re-shoot method drawn from the decisive-moment and film-discipline ideas.

Exercise 36.17 ⭐⭐ — Rescue a Pictorialist mush. A described failure: a portrait shot deliberately soft "for mood" — but it just looks like a focusing error; the eyes aren't sharp, the haze hides the expression, and it reads as a mistake, not a style. Diagnose why the Pictorialist intent failed and prescribe how to make softness read as a choice rather than an accident.

Part E — Eye Training & the Light Log (no camera required)

Exercise 36.18 ⭐ — A historical Light Log entry. Make a Light Log entry (Chapter 5) about a light you noticed today, then add a sentence naming which tradition that light would have served: was it f/64 raking landscape light, soft documentary light, New Color neon, decisive-moment flat daylight? Connecting daily light to historical seeing is the point.

Exercise 36.19 ⭐⭐ — Audit your camera roll for lineage. Scroll back through 100 of your own recent photographs and tally how many fall into each tradition (straight, decisive moment, documentary, New Color, snapshot, other). What does the tally reveal about the lineage you actually shoot in, versus the one you think you do? This directly feeds the Portfolio Checkpoint.

Exercise 36.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Find the missing photographer. Spend twenty minutes researching one historically overlooked photographer — a woman, a photographer of color, or someone working outside Europe/North America — whose work the standard canon underweights (Vivian Maier is one famous example; find another). Write three sentences: who they were, what they saw, and which tradition in this chapter they belong to or expand. The canon is wider than its table of contents (§36.3, ♿).

Part F — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 36.21 ⭐⭐ — Zone System meets f/64. Return to Chapter 8's tonal thinking and apply it to one landscape: write out where you want each major element to fall on the tonal scale (deep shadow → bright highlight), then shoot and process to place them there. Connect, in writing, why this is the f/64 / straight-photography method historically.

Exercise 36.22 ⭐⭐ — Decisive moment meets the street. Combine Chapter 10 (anticipation, gesture) and Chapter 17 (zone focusing, candid, consent). Make three street frames that earn the name "decisive moment," then write, for each, what you anticipated and how long you waited. Respect the consent and privacy practices from Chapter 17.

Exercise 36.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — Documentary meets ethics. Make one honest documentary-style portrait of a real person (Chapter 13's window light, Chapter 32's consent and dignity). Then write a paragraph placing your image in the FSA tradition and naming the ethical responsibilities you took on toward the person. History and ethics are the same conversation here.

Exercise 36.24 ⭐⭐ — Color, then and now. Take one New Color-style saturated frame (Exercise 36.8) and process it two ways (Chapter 27): once pushing the color toward the lush, slightly unreal New Color palette, and once toward neutral, restrained color. Compare. Write which serves the image and why — and how the historical movement informs your grade.

Exercise 36.25 ⭐⭐⭐ — The History Walk, abridged. Run a compressed version of Case Study 36.2: take one block of the busy intersection or market location and make three keeper frames in three different traditions in a single outing — say f/64 (the architecture, sharp and tonal), the decisive moment (a figure completing the geometry), and the snapshot (the block being ordinary). The same camera makes all three; only the seeing-question changes. Lay the three side by side and write which one is most you — your first evidence for the Portfolio Checkpoint's "name your lineage."

Exercise 36.26 ⭐⭐ — Document vs. art, your own edit. Take one honest frame you have shot and make two finished versions (Chapter 26/29): a document version (minimal manipulation — only the adjustments a straight photographer would accept, like exposure and a sensor spot) and an art version (slide toward expression — tidy a distraction, shift the color, crop for drama). Place each on the document↔art line of Figure 36.2 and write a sentence on what you gained and lost moving from one to the other.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 36.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — A week in conversation with one tradition. Choose the single tradition your work most descends from (the Portfolio Checkpoint's "name your lineage" step). For seven days, make one photograph each day in deliberate conversation with it — not copies, but dialogues, each informed by the movement's core idea and by the four decisions. At week's end, lay the seven out together. You should see, in your own work, both the tradition's influence and your own emerging difference from it. Note which day's image is the strongest and why — this is a direct on-ramp to Chapters 39 (voice) and 40 (the capstone).

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Try each — with a camera, or with your eyes for the no-camera ones — before reading them. In photography, and in reading photography's history, the attempt is the lesson.