Top 7 'Mundane-to-Magical' Photo Challenges to learn with your smartphone on your lunch break - Goh Ling Yong
Stuck in a creative rut? We’ve all been there. That precious hour in the middle of your workday, often spent scrolling through endless feeds or eating a sad desk salad, feels like a creative dead zone. You see stunning photos online and think, "I could never do that. I don't have the time, the fancy camera, or the exotic locations."
I'm here to tell you that's nonsense. The most powerful tool for reigniting your creative spark is already in your pocket. And your most under-utilised photo studio is the ten-block radius around your office, your campus, or even your own kitchen. Your lunch break isn't a dead zone; it's a golden opportunity. It's a bite-sized, pressure-free window to practice, play, and see the world differently.
This is your invitation to reclaim that time. Forget expensive gear and far-flung destinations. We’re going on an adventure into the overlooked and the ordinary. These seven "mundane-to-magical" smartphone photography challenges are designed to be done in 30 minutes or less, transforming your break into a mini creative workshop. Let’s turn the boring into the beautiful.
1. The Puddlegram Perspective
We’re so used to seeing the world from eye level that we forget there’s an entire universe at our feet. The Puddlegram Challenge is your mission to explore it. After a rain shower, your city is dotted with portals to another dimension—puddles. These temporary mirrors can capture stunning, surreal reflections of the world, turning a mundane patch of wet pavement into a breathtaking canvas.
This challenge is all about perspective. It forces you to get low, to see the world from a completely different angle. You'll stop seeing a puddle and start seeing a perfectly framed reflection of a skyscraper against a dramatic sky, or the distorted, painterly image of a passing cyclist. No rain? No problem. A polished tabletop, a car's wing mirror, or even the screen of a second smartphone can create the same magical effect. It's a technique that I know Goh Ling Yong often uses to find extraordinary beauty in ordinary scenes.
How to capture it:
- Get Low: Bring your smartphone lens as close to the water's surface as you can without getting it wet. This minimizes the foreground and maximizes the reflection.
- Tap to Focus: Tap on the reflection in your screen, not the surface of the water. This tells your phone what the real subject of your photo is.
- The Flip Trick: After you take the shot, go into your editing app and flip the image 180 degrees (upside down). This simple edit often creates a mind-bending, surrealist image where the reflection looks like the real world.
- Look for Contrast: The best puddlegrams have a strong subject, like a striking piece of architecture, a colourful tree, or dramatic clouds, to reflect.
2. The Shadow Story
Where there is light, there is shadow. But for most of us, shadows are just… there. We ignore them. This challenge asks you to do the opposite: make the shadow the hero of your photograph. Shadows aren't just dark patches; they are silhouettes, patterns, and storytellers. They can create drama, mystery, and incredible graphic compositions from the simplest of objects.
During your lunch break, especially on a sunny day, the world is painted with long, stark shadows. The railings of a staircase become a bold set of parallel lines. A lone fire hydrant casts a dramatic, elongated figure. Your own shadow can become a character in a self-portrait. This exercise trains your eye to see light and form, the fundamental building blocks of any great photograph. You’ll start noticing how the quality of light changes the shape and mood of everything around you.
How to capture it:
- Hunt for Hard Light: The midday sun, often considered "bad" for portraits, is perfect for this challenge because it creates high-contrast, well-defined shadows.
- Leading Lines: Use the long lines of shadows cast by buildings, fences, or lampposts to lead the viewer's eye through your image.
- Tell a Story: A single object, like a discarded coffee cup, can cast a shadow that feels lonely or contemplative. Try placing an object strategically to see what kind of story its shadow tells.
- Go Abstract: Focus on the interplay of light and shadow on a textured surface, like a brick wall or a corrugated metal sheet, to create a purely abstract and graphic image.
3. The Single-Colour Safari
Our brains are wired to see scenes, not components. We see a "park," not the thousand different shades of green, brown, and grey that create it. The Single-Colour Safari forces you to deconstruct your environment. For 15 minutes, pick one colour—and one colour only—to photograph. Suddenly, you're not just looking for a "good photo," you're on a visual treasure hunt.
This exercise is incredibly powerful for developing your photographer's eye. It teaches you to see beyond the obvious subject and pay attention to composition, texture, and light within a constrained palette. You'll be amazed at how many variations of "office-printer-paper-blue" or "fire-hydrant-red" you can find once you start looking. It turns a mundane walk into a game of visual discovery.
How to capture it:
- Pick a Dominant Colour: Start with something common, like blue (sky, signs, cars) or green (plants, benches, signs).
- Fill the Frame: Try to make your chosen colour the most dominant element in the photograph. This could mean getting up close to a painted wall or aiming your camera up at a pure blue sky.
- Look for Variations: A great collection will showcase different shades, tints, and textures of the same colour. Think of the difference between the red of a stop sign, the red of a brick, and the red of a flower petal.
- Create a Diptych or Triptych: In a simple editing app, combine your best 2-3 photos from your safari into a single image to create a striking, themed collage.
4. The Texture Tapestry
Zoom out, and the world can feel flat. Zoom in, and you'll find a universe of detail. The Texture Tapestry challenge is about getting intimately close with the surfaces around you. Ignore the whole object and focus only on its tactile quality: the flaking paint on a park bench, the rough grain of an old wooden door, the intricate weave of the fabric on a chair, the bubbles in a pane of glass.
Your smartphone is surprisingly good at this. Most modern phones have excellent close-focusing capabilities, allowing you to capture a level of detail that the naked eye often misses. This challenge is a meditative practice. It slows you down and forces you to appreciate the small, imperfect details that give our world character. The goal isn't to show what something is, but what it feels like.
How to capture it:
- Get Close, Then Closer: Physically move your phone as close as you can to the surface until it focuses. Don't rely on the digital zoom, which will degrade your image quality.
- Use Side Lighting: Light that comes from the side (grazing light) is the best for revealing texture. It creates tiny highlights and shadows across a surface, making it pop. Position yourself so the sun or a window is to the side of your subject.
- Go Black and White: Removing colour is a fantastic way to emphasize texture. Without the distraction of hues, the viewer's eye is drawn directly to the patterns, lines, and contrasts of the surface.
- Find Unlikely Subjects: Look beyond the obvious wood and stone. Try capturing the texture of a leaf, the condensation on a cold glass, the worn leather of a wallet, or the surface of your coffee.
5. The "Look Up" Landscape
How much of your day is spent looking down at a screen or straight ahead? The "Look Up" Landscape is a simple but profound shift in perspective. For the next 15 minutes of your break, your camera is only allowed to point upwards. You’ll be shocked at what you’ve been missing.
This challenge reveals the hidden architecture, geometry, and negative space that hovers just above our heads. In a city, it’s the stunning "urban canyons" formed by skyscrapers converging against the sky. Inside, it’s the industrial patterns of exposed ductwork or the elegant design of a light fixture. This exercise literally changes your point of view and helps you find compelling compositions in the most overlooked of places—the ceiling.
How to capture it:
- Use Your Gridlines: Turn on the gridlines in your camera app. This is crucial for keeping the vertical lines of buildings straight and creating a sense of scale and order in your architectural shots.
- Find the Negative Space: Often, the most interesting part of a "look up" photo isn't the buildings themselves, but the shape of the sky trapped between them. Look for interesting shapes—triangles, slivers, and squares.
- Juxtapose Nature and Structure: Frame your shot so you capture the branches of a tree reaching across the facade of a glass building, or a single cloud drifting past a sharp corner.
- Find Symmetry: Stand directly in the center of a room, hallway, or alley and point your camera straight up to create powerful, symmetrical compositions.
6. The Frame Within a Frame
This is a classic compositional technique that instantly adds depth, context, and a professional touch to your mobile photography. The concept is simple: find something in your environment to use as a natural frame for your main subject. This isn’t about adding a digital border later; it’s about using the world around you to build your composition.
A frame within a frame draws the viewer's eye directly to the most important part of the image. It adds a sense of place and can even tell a story. Looking through a window at a rainy street feels different than just taking a picture of the street. Peeking through a doorway to capture a colleague working adds a sense of intimacy and observation. Your lunch break environment is full of these natural frames—you just have to start seeing them.
How to capture it:
- Hunt for Frames: Look for doorways, windows, arches, tree branches, gaps in a fence, or even the space between someone's arm and body. Anything can be a frame.
- Create Depth: Use the frame to separate the foreground from the background. You can tap to focus on the distant subject, leaving the frame slightly blurry, which enhances the sense of depth.
- Play with Light and Shadow: Use a dark frame, like the inside of a tunnel or a dark doorway, to frame a brightly lit subject. This contrast makes your subject pop.
- Don't Be Too Obvious: Sometimes the most effective frames are subtle—a wisp of a tree branch in one corner or the edge of a building just slicing into the side of your photo.
7. The Abstract Light Bender
Our final challenge is the most experimental. It’s not about capturing a subject, but about capturing light itself. Forget objects and people; your mission is to photograph refractions, reflections, lens flare, and bokeh. This is about turning your phone into a tool for creating pure, abstract art.
Look at how light interacts with the world. A simple glass of water on a windowsill can become a prism, casting tiny rainbows on the table. The sun hitting your lens at just the right angle can create a beautiful, cinematic flare. The distant city lights, when intentionally thrown out of focus, transform into soft, glowing orbs of colour (bokeh). This challenge frees you from the pressure of "taking a good picture of something" and encourages you to simply play with light and colour.
How to capture it:
- Master Manual Focus: If your phone's camera app has a "Pro" or "Manual" mode, use it to manually de-focus your lens. Point it at a light source, slide the focus to its closest setting, and watch the lights bloom into beautiful bokeh circles.
- Chase Rainbows: Carry a small prism or even an old CD/DVD with you. Hold it up to your lens in the sunlight and photograph the spectacular rainbow patterns it creates on different surfaces.
- Shoot Through Things: Photograph the world through a water bottle, a glass with condensation, or a smudged piece of plastic. The distortions and refractions can create stunning, painterly effects.
- Embrace Lens Flare: Don't be afraid to point your camera (carefully!) towards the sun. Let the light spill into your lens and experiment with the starbursts and colourful flares that appear as you move the camera around.
Creativity isn't a lightning strike; it's a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. That hour in the middle of your day is the perfect, low-stakes gym for your creative mind. As I've learned from mentors like Goh Ling Yong, the key to better photography isn't a better camera, it's a more curious eye.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect vacation to take photos. The magic is right here, right now, hidden in the mundane. Pick one of these seven challenges for your lunch break this week. Just one. See what you discover. You might just find that your ordinary world is far more magical than you ever imagined.
Now it's your turn. Which challenge are you most excited to try? Let me know in the comments below! And if you capture a mundane-to-magical moment, share it on Instagram and tag us with the hashtag #GohLingYongChallenge. I can't wait to see what you create.
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
Stay updated with the latest posts and insights by following on your favorite platform!