The Color Challenge: 90 Minutes Photographing Downtown Scottsdale

A morning in downtown Scottsdale with two photographers, three colors, and one very determined Canon on her knees.

Most of the time, photography works like this: something catches your eye, you raise your camera, you shoot. You are drawn to the subject. The subject earns your attention.

But what happens when you flip that around? What if instead of photographing what inspires you, you have to photograph what doesn't?

That was the challenge I threw at my photographer friends on April 4th. And honestly, I wasn't sure anyone would show up.

The Rules Were Simple (The Execution, Less So)

Here's how it worked. Each person picks a color, any color, and for 90 minutes you can only photograph that color. Not your favorite color. Not the color you'd naturally gravitate toward on a beautiful Scottsdale morning. A color you have to hunt for. A color that makes you work.

The goal wasn't to make things easy. It was to practice the thing photographers sometimes forget we need to practice: finding the image when the image isn't obvious.

Three of us accepted the challenge.

Soumya, a friend I met through Toastmasters and someone I already knew was a seriously good photographer, chose pink. (I'll come back to a small infraction there in a moment.) My husband Vincent, who has a sharp eye for product photography and absolutely knew what he was signing himself up for, chose purple. And I chose yellow.

We met downtown Scottsdale on a Saturday morning and got to work.

Yellow: Easier Than Expected, Thanks to a Very Unexpected Crowd

I will admit yellow felt like a relatively safe choice at first. Scottsdale has yellow everywhere: buildings, flowers, signage, the occasional tuk-tuk parked in front of a mural. I felt reasonably confident.

What I did not expect was an entire gathering of exotic and vintage cars parked along the street, seemingly there for some kind of informal car meet. Suddenly I had a gleaming yellow Aston Martin Vantage, a 1957 Porsche 1600 Super with an Oregon plate, and enough chrome and color to keep me busy for the full 90 minutes.

But the car meet was almost too easy, which meant I had to push myself further. The shots I ended up loving most weren't the obvious ones. They were the details: the abstract geometry of a yellow tiled wall, the bird of paradise blooms against the blue sky, the street number 7119 on a yellow building that most people walked past without a second glance.

That's the whole point of the challenge. When you're forced to look for one thing, you start seeing it everywhere. And then you start seeing it differently.

Pink (With a Side of Red): Soumya Commits Fully

Soumya did not take it easy on herself either. She went for pink, which sounds approachable until you realize how quickly pink bleeds into red and how much your eye starts justifying the difference when you're desperate for a shot.

She cheated a little. I'm putting it in writing. By mid-morning, pink had quietly expanded to include red. I respected the creative flexibility.

What I will not forget is the image of Soumya completely on her knees on the sidewalk, camera in hand, face inches from a flower bed, smiling like this was the most natural position in the world. A Porsche was parked ten feet behind her. Pedestrians walked around her. She did not notice any of it.

That is what happens when you're actually in it. You stop performing photography and you start doing it.

Her final ten were beautiful: the Sugar Bowl's Valentine window display, a red Porsche 944 front-on against a row of palm trees, the close-up blur of geraniums, a Ducati that happened to be parked right in front of the Coffee and Car Club. Red showed up for her.

Purple: Vincent Goes Full Commitment

And then there was Vincent.

Purple. In downtown Scottsdale on an ordinary Saturday morning. I watched him look around at the street we were standing on and register, with complete calm, that he had made a difficult choice.

He disappeared.

While Soumya and I were finding our colors around every corner, Vincent was walking further and further down the street, hunting. Purple is not a color that announces itself. It hides in flower petals and window reflections and the underside of shadows. You have to be patient with it.

His favorite shot of the morning? A blurry window reflection with a logo caught in the glass. Abstract, unexpected, and honestly a little bit beautiful. That's product photography instincts at work: seeing the thing inside the thing, finding the graphic quality in what most people would dismiss as a smudge on glass.

What 90 Minutes of Creative Constraint Actually Teaches You

Here's what I took away from the morning.

Constraints force creativity. When you can photograph anything, you often photograph nothing particularly interesting. When you can only photograph yellow, suddenly the world reorganizes itself around that one rule and your brain starts working harder.

Discomfort is the whole point. The shots I was least excited about going in ended up being the ones I had to think about most. And thinking is where interesting photography lives.

Shooting with other photographers is underrated. We spend so much time working alone, especially those of us who do portrait and headshot work. There's something that happens when you're out with people who love photography the way you do. The conversation is different. The energy is different. Soumya and I hadn't seen each other in a long time, and 90 minutes of walking and shooting together was genuinely one of the best mornings I've had in a while.

Downtown Scottsdale rewards a slow walk. This is a neighborhood I photograph in regularly for Scottsdale headshots and personal branding sessions, and I still found details on April 4th that I had never noticed before. The mosaic sidewalk. The layered reflections in the gallery windows. The way the desert light hits the older buildings on the quieter blocks. If you've never walked the Old Town area with a camera and nowhere specific to be, I'd recommend it.

What's Next

I want to do this again. Maybe once a month, a small group, a new constraint. Color is just one option: you could do shapes, or a single focal length, or only shooting from below knee height.

The problem is the heat. If you've spent a summer in the Phoenix metro area you already know: by June, a 90-minute outdoor walk with a camera is not a creative exercise, it's a survival situation. So this particular challenge is going on pause until fall, when the temperatures remember that humans exist.

But if you're a photographer in the Scottsdale or Phoenix area and this sounds like something you'd want to be part of, reach out. The more the merrier, and purple needs more competition.

I do a lot of my work right here in downtown Scottsdale, and if you've been thinking about updated Scottsdale headshots or personal branding photos, I'd love to connect.

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