Exercise Your Visualizer

This post is running dangerously close to "ten quick tips to pep up your snaps" but when I hit upon this exercise last night I was so enamored with it that here here we are. The exercise is quite straightforward, and runs thus:

Grab your camera and screw some lens on the front of it. I selected my 60mm macro to give me a lot of flexibility in points of view.

Select a subject. Probably something relatively small/portable. You may want to move it around, put it on different backgrounds, manipulate it, draw on it, carve it up, I don't know.

Shoot four pictures. You may make lots of exposures, but your goal is four pictures.

1. The present.
2. The past.
3. The future.
4. The never-was.

Devise treatments for the subject that reflect your idea of the subject now, in the past, in the future, and as some sort of fantasy of the subject, a hypothetical that never was and never will be. A pencil was new and sharp once, is dull with use now, and will some day be broken. But it might be a starship, if you look at it right.

Here are mine.