Have you heard of a Color Photo Walk? It’s a fun activity you can do by yourself, with friends, or with your kids. It’s simple, free (depending on your camera of choice), and a great way to spend some time outdoors. Whether you’re walking around a park or exploring downtown, this activity is a fun outting that you can do multiple times.
Here’s how you can plan your own Color Photo Walk:
Pick a Color
You can choose a color for your photo walk by doing one of these three methods:
- Pick a color on a piece of paper – put the papers in a hat or a bowl and pick one blindly
- Pick a color you want to photograph – if you want to photograph Purple, go for it!
- Use an online randomizer – utilize techonology on your phone
Which option you choose may depend on how many people you do this photo walk with. For instance, if it’s just you, pick whatever color tickles your fance. If it’s just two or three of you, an online randomizer is easy and quick. For a larger group, I’d do pieces of paper and make the picking a color part of the fun.
I forgot to write down different colors on pieces of paper so we could blindly select our colors. So, while we grabbed some coffee downtown before we started our photowalk, I opened an online randomizer on my phone. I entered in the colors and hit “spin” for both of us. I got Yellow and he got Green.
Select Your Camera
Pick a camera you’d like to use for your photo walk. It can be a cell phone, a film camera, or a nice mirrorless camera with a lens of your choice. If you’re doing this with you kids, sharing your phone is an option or you can invest in a kid camera like Campsnap or go old school with a disposable film camera.
The camera doesn’t matter that much but it can help your experience. I used my R6 Mark ii for my photo walk. I chose a 50 mm lens thinking I’d see yellow far away and would need a little extra zoom than what my 35 mm could offer. But I quickly discovered that most of the things I wanted to take photos of were close up. My 35 mm would have been a better choice. A zoom lens like a 28-70 mm would have worked well for this, too. But an expensive zoom lens is definitely not necessary.
Take Your Photos
Take your time while walking around to make sure you don’t miss anything. Your color may be above or below your line of sight. Be sure to turn around every now and then for a different perspective. And keeps your eyes peeled.
At the end of the walk, share your photos with your friends. I created the collages below using Canva, which has an app for your phone.
For my photo walk, I explored downtown San Antonio with a friend on a beautiful spring morning. We’re both photographers so we used our mirrorless cameras we use for work. We both donned our 50 mm prime lenses so we would share the same challenges and parameters. I photographed the color yellow. He photographed the color green.
I thought I’d have an easy time finding Yellow around San Antonio, but it was a bit of a challenge. San Antonio is a very colorful city and yet it was hard to find things with the color yellow. His challenge with the color green was choosing what to photograph since there was a lot of greenery. But he lucked out because we did our photowalk the weekend before St. Patrick’s day, which meant there was a lot more green around that usual.
Will you be trying a photo walk this summer?
To see another photo walk I did in San Antonio, click here to read about it on the blog!
