Top 16 'Perspective-Shifting' Photo Challenges to master for Capturing the Unseen Story of Your City in 2025 - Goh Ling Yong
Ever feel like you’re walking through your own city with photographic blinders on? You pass the same monuments, the same bustling streets, the same quiet alleyways, and your camera stays in your bag. You know there are stories there, but you can’t seem to find a new way to tell them. It’s a creative rut we’ve all been in—the feeling that you’ve already captured everything your city has to offer.
I’m here to tell you that’s not true. Your city is a living, breathing entity, with countless unseen stories unfolding every single second. The problem isn’t the city; it’s our perspective. We get so used to seeing things from eye-level, from the same predictable angles, that we forget to look up, down, and through the world around us. To break free, you don't need a new city; you need new eyes.
That's where this guide comes in. For 2025, let’s make a pact to rediscover our urban playgrounds. I’ve compiled 16 perspective-shifting photo challenges designed to shatter your creative blocks and force you to see the familiar in a completely new light. These aren’t just technical exercises; they are new ways of seeing. Grab your camera, charge your batteries, and let’s go find the hidden soul of your city.
1. The Worm's-Eye View Challenge
We spend our lives looking straight ahead or down at our phones. This challenge flips that on its head—literally. The goal is to get as low to the ground as possible and shoot upwards. This simple shift in elevation dramatically alters your perception of the world, turning mundane objects into towering monuments.
This perspective is fantastic for exaggerating scale and creating a sense of awe. A simple puddle becomes a reflective lake, a skyscraper seems to pierce the heavens, and a passing cyclist looks like a giant hurtling through the landscape. It forces you to notice the textures of the pavement, the forgotten details at the base of buildings, and the world from the viewpoint of a child or an animal.
Pro-Tip: Use a camera with a flip-out screen to save your back and knees! A wide-angle lens (16-35mm) works wonders here, as it will exaggerate the sense of height and a vast, dramatic sky. Look for interesting foreground elements—a crack in the pavement, a discarded leaf, a manhole cover—to anchor your shot.
2. The Bird's-Eye View Challenge
The opposite of the worm’s-eye view, this challenge tasks you with finding elevated positions to shoot down from. Think rooftops, bridges, parking garages, or even just the top floor of an office building. This perspective detaches you from the street-level chaos and reveals the city's hidden geometry.
From above, the city transforms into a beautiful tapestry of patterns, lines, and shapes. The flow of traffic becomes a river of light, intersections become intricate designs, and crowds of people form fascinating, ever-changing patterns. This viewpoint is less about individual stories and more about the grand, interconnected story of the urban system itself. It’s about order in the chaos.
Pro-Tip: A telephoto lens can be your best friend here, allowing you to isolate interesting patterns and moments from a distance. Pay attention to the time of day; long shadows during the golden hour can add incredible depth and definition to the shapes you see below.
3. The Monochromatic Mission
Spend an entire week shooting exclusively in black and white. Set your camera to its monochrome mode so you see the world without color through your viewfinder. This is one of the most powerful exercises for improving your compositional skills.
When you remove color, you are forced to see the world in its fundamental elements: light, shadow, texture, shape, and form. You start noticing the subtle interplay of light on a building's facade, the rich textures in a weathered wall, and the pure graphic power of a strong silhouette. It trains your eye to look past the distraction of color and focus on the emotional core of a scene.
Pro-Tip: Look for high-contrast scenes. Bright sunlight creates deep, dramatic shadows that are perfect for black and white. Also, focus on textures—peeling paint, rough concrete, smooth glass—as they become much more prominent and compelling in monochrome.
4. The Single-Block Deep Dive
Pick one, and only one, city block. Your challenge is to spend an entire day (or even a whole week) photographing nothing but that single block. It sounds restrictive, but this limitation is designed to unlock your creativity and observational skills.
At first, you’ll capture the obvious: the storefronts, the main architecture. But as time passes, you’ll be forced to look deeper. You’ll notice the way the light changes from morning to night, the daily routines of the shopkeepers, the children who play on the sidewalk after school, the graffiti hidden in the alley. You stop being a tourist and become an intimate observer, finding the micro-stories that make up the life of that small space.
Pro-Tip: Don’t just stay in one spot. Explore every nook and cranny: alleyways, doorways, windows, rooftops (if accessible). Talk to the people who live and work there. Their stories can lead you to your most powerful images.
5. Chasing Reflections
For this challenge, your primary subject isn't the object itself, but its reflection. Hunt for reflective surfaces: rain puddles after a storm, polished marble walls, storefront windows, the side of a bus, or even a pair of sunglasses.
Reflections add an immediate layer of depth, complexity, and often, surrealism to your photos. They allow you to capture two scenes in one—the reality and its distorted, dreamlike twin. A puddle can reflect the sky and a skyscraper, merging the heavens and the earth in a single frame. A shop window can superimpose the bustling street scene onto the quiet interior, telling a story of two separate worlds colliding.
Pro-Tip: Use a polarizing filter to control the intensity of the reflection. By rotating it, you can make the reflection more or less transparent, giving you creative control over how you blend the layers of your image. Pay attention to your own reflection to make sure you're not unintentionally in the shot!
6. The 'Golden Hour' & 'Blue Hour' Only Challenge
Limit your photography to the magical periods of light just after sunrise and just before sunset (Golden Hour), and the time just before sunrise and after sunset (Blue Hour). The city is a different world during these times.
Golden Hour bathes everything in a warm, soft, ethereal light, creating long, dramatic shadows and making even the most mundane scenes look beautiful. Blue Hour offers a cool, moody, and tranquil palette, with the deep blue of the sky contrasting beautifully with the warm glow of city lights. This challenge teaches you the profound impact of light on mood and story, forcing you to plan your shoots around the sun.
Pro-Tip: Use a tripod. The light is low during these times, especially during Blue Hour, and a tripod will allow you to use a slower shutter speed to capture crisp, noise-free images and create beautiful light trails from traffic.
7. Framing Within a Frame
This is a classic compositional technique that instantly adds a sense of depth and context to your images. The challenge is to actively look for natural frames within the urban environment and use them to compose your shot.
Look for doorways, arches, windows, bridges, or even the gap between two buildings. By placing your subject within this "inner frame," you guide the viewer's eye directly to what's important. It creates a sense of voyeurism, as if the viewer is peeking into a scene, making the image more intimate and engaging.
Pro-Tip: Don't be afraid to let your frame be out of focus or silhouetted. This can help separate it from the main subject and add to the sense of depth. Experiment with different shapes and sizes of frames for varied effects.
8. The Shadow Play Project
Instead of photographing people and objects, make their shadows the star of the show. This challenge requires you to completely rethink what a "subject" is and pay close attention to the direction and quality of light.
Shadows can be mysterious, graphic, and tell a story all on their own. The elongated shadow of a person walking can convey a sense of loneliness or the passage of time. The intricate shadow cast by a fire escape can become a beautiful abstract pattern on a brick wall. This project is all about seeing the negative space and the ephemeral, fleeting art created by light and form.
Pro-Tip: The best time for this is when the sun is low in the sky—early morning or late afternoon—as this creates the longest and most defined shadows. Look for clean, uncluttered backgrounds like walls or sidewalks to make the shadows stand out.
9. The Leading Lines Hunt
Your mission is to find and master the use of leading lines. These are lines within your image—roads, railings, fences, building edges, pathways—that draw the viewer's eye through the composition, typically towards a point of interest.
This is a fundamental skill in photography, and dedicating a shoot to it will permanently improve your compositions. Leading lines create a sense of depth, scale, and movement. They can make a static image feel dynamic, guiding the narrative of the photo from one point to another. Once you start looking for them, you'll see them everywhere.
Pro-Tip: Get low to the ground to exaggerate the perspective of a leading line, making it appear to converge more dramatically. A wide-angle lens will enhance this effect. S-curves, like a winding road or river, are particularly pleasing and create a graceful visual journey.
10. Juxtaposition Journalism
The city is a place of contrasts. This challenge tasks you with capturing two or more contrasting ideas or elements within a single frame to tell a powerful story.
Think old versus new (a historic church dwarfed by a modern skyscraper), nature versus concrete (a single flower growing through a crack in the pavement), wealth versus poverty, or motion versus stillness. These images are compelling because they highlight the tensions, ironies, and complexities of urban life. They make the viewer think and ask questions.
Pro-Tip: This requires patience and a keen eye. Find a location where contrasting elements are likely to interact and wait for the right moment. The key is to create a composition where both elements are clearly visible and their relationship is immediately understandable.
11. The Abstract Architecture Challenge
Forget photographing entire buildings. For this challenge, get up close and personal with architecture. Your goal is to fill the frame with the shapes, patterns, textures, and lines of a building, removing all context of what it actually is.
The result is a purely abstract image that celebrates form and design. Look for repeating patterns in windows, the sweeping curve of a modern facade, the texture of weathered stone, or the interplay of light and shadow on a geometric surface. This is a meditative exercise that trains your eye to see beauty in pure design, divorced from function.
Pro-Tip: A telephoto lens is excellent for isolating details from a distance. Walk around a building and observe it from all angles and at different times of day to see how the light interacts with its surfaces.
12. A Stranger's Story
This is a classic street photography challenge, but one that pushes many out of their comfort zone. The goal is to capture a candid portrait of a stranger that hints at a larger story. I remember attending a workshop where the instructor, a peer of Goh Ling Yong, emphasized that the goal isn't just to take a picture of someone, but to capture a picture about them.
Look for moments of emotion, interaction, or quiet contemplation. An elderly woman looking out a bus window, a musician lost in their song, two friends sharing a laugh. The key is to be respectful, discreet, and quick. You are capturing a fleeting, authentic slice of life.
Pro-Tip: Use a prime lens (like a 35mm or 50mm) which is small and unobtrusive. Find a busy area, pick a spot with a clean background and good light, and wait for the right character to enter your scene. Always be aware of local laws and cultural sensitivities regarding photographing people in public.
13. The Motion Blur Masterpiece
Embrace the city's constant motion by using a slow shutter speed to create intentional motion blur. This technique can transform a chaotic scene into a beautiful, flowing work of art.
The classic example is capturing traffic at night to create streaks of light. But you can also apply this to crowds of people, a moving subway, or an escalator. The key is to keep one element in your frame perfectly sharp to act as an anchor, which emphasizes the movement around it. This is called "panning" if you're tracking a moving subject, or simply using a tripod to keep the static elements sharp.
Pro-Tip: You'll need a tripod for this. Start with a shutter speed of around 1/15th of a second and experiment. A Neutral Density (ND) filter can be a huge help during the day, as it reduces the amount of light entering your lens, allowing you to use a slow shutter speed without overexposing the image.
14. The Color Palette Project
This challenge is a fantastic way to train your eye for color theory and create a cohesive, visually striking series of photos. Choose one or two dominant colors (e.g., blue and yellow, or just red) and for a day, only photograph scenes where those colors are the main subject.
You’ll start seeing your city in a completely different way. You’ll ignore everything that doesn't fit your chosen palette, and your brain will become hyper-aware of your target colors. A red fire hydrant, a yellow taxi, a blue door—these simple objects become the heroes of your images. This creates a powerful, unified body of work.
Pro-Tip: This is not about just finding an object of a certain color. It's about how that color interacts with the light, the background, and other elements in the scene. Look for color harmony or striking color contrasts.
15. Through the Glass
Use a layer of glass as a creative element in your compositions. Shoot through cafe windows, bus or train windows, or even glass with raindrops on it. This simple technique adds layers of meaning and visual interest to your photos.
Shooting through glass can create a sense of separation, distance, or voyeurism. The reflections, smudges, or raindrops on the glass can add texture and an abstract quality to the image, blending the world inside with the world outside. It’s a powerful way to tell a story about connection and disconnection in the city.
Pro-Tip: Experiment with your focus. Do you focus on the subject through the glass, making the glass a soft frame? Or do you focus on the raindrops on the glass, letting the background blur into a beautiful bokeh? Both can yield stunning and emotionally resonant results.
16. The Unseen Details
For our final challenge, switch to a macro lens or simply get as close as your lens will allow. Your mission is to document the tiny, often-overlooked details that give a city its unique character.
Think of the texture of peeling paint on a bench, the intricate design of a manhole cover, the rust patterns on a metal fence, or the weathered typography on an old sign. These small details are the city’s fingerprints. This challenge is a quiet, meditative practice that teaches you to slow down and appreciate the beauty in the small, the worn, and the imperfect.
Pro-Tip: Lighting is crucial for macro photography. Overcast days are often best as they provide soft, even light that brings out texture without harsh shadows. Look for details that tell a story of time, wear, and human touch.
Your City is Waiting
There you have it—16 challenges to break you out of your creative comfort zone and help you capture the unseen story of your city in 2025. As my friend and mentor Goh Ling Yong often says, the best camera isn't the most expensive one, but the one that encourages you to see differently.
Don't feel pressured to do them all at once. Pick one that excites you, or one that terrifies you, and dedicate your next photo walk to it. The goal isn't to get a perfect shot every time; it's to retrain your eye, to build your creative muscles, and to fall back in love with the photographic potential of your own backyard.
Now, it's your turn. Which challenge are you going to try first? Do you have any other perspective-shifting ideas? Share your thoughts in the comments below, and if you post your challenge photos on Instagram, be sure to tag us and use the hashtag #CityUnseen2025 so we can see your amazing work
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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