Your first reaction upon hearing about "The Photographer's Playbook", edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern might be to dismiss it out of hand. This initial reaction might be further reinforced upon seeing the front cover of the book (look it up). But I highly encourage you to tamp down your native cynicism and pick up a copy right away, because there are many great ideas contained between the covers. Essentially, the book is a curated selection of assignments, exercises, stories, and the like from a large number of well respected photographers. You could probably design an entire course or seminar around ideas borrowed from this book.
At any rate, today's topic comes from John Gossage. You'll need to buy the book to really get the most out of the exercise, but the brief is to "make pictures to annoy people".
This could be a practical strategy if you are preparing for a critique and are expecting the worst. If your critic is a hard core documentary photographer, including a few images created using intentional camera movement (ICM) could be interesting.
This was a digital capture created by setting the ISO to its lowest value, the aperture to its smallest value and leaving the shutter open for 30 sec while walking around the house at night swinging the camera around. What makes this image memorable to me was that the brightest element suggests a human figure.
Here is a more straightforward ICM image, one in which the shutter was around half a second and the camera was panned vertically during the exposure. It has a very painterly look which I find appealing.
Making pictures to annoy people. Seems silly, but it can get you into a head space where creativity thrives. Give it a try.
Another thing Gossage suggests is to learn how to tell at least one good joke. Could come in handy if your images are a tad too annoying.
