Slow Motion

Hi Everyone,

I feel like ranting so you all get to hear about my day.

Photography was really good. It is a much more complicated process to develop film than I thought. Somehow I thought the complicated part would be printing(maybe it is, we haven't done that yet). There are so many different washes and stages and finicky temperatures and no light allowed and whatnot. It was really hard learning how to wind the film onto the spools. It isn't that difficult of a task, a bit tricky, but we had to get good enough at it that we could do it in the dark. We split up into groups of four to develop and I think my film turned out really well. Some people had big chunks where there wasn't anything on it but I only lost the first couple photos that I knew I would lose when we had to open the camera because the film wasn't loaded properly. I have to shoot another roll of film and develop it on my own before next class so we'll see how that goes.

My group was done early so I went downstairs to the art supply store and spent a fortune on photopaper and film and a big pad of newsprint for drawing class. Photography is such an expensive class! But very rewarding.

My next class was studio practice which is where my rant comes in. Instead of regular class we joined a workshop by a visiting artist. He does walking art. It is way too out there for me. We walked up to the Public Gardens (on the way I talked with a Korean boy named Daniel who is in all of my classes and is really nice). When we got there we began this walk. The Public Gardens aren't huge, just one city block. We didn't even enter the gardens, we stayed on the sidewalk. The idea was to take fifteen minutes to walk each side, no talking, just walking incredibly slowly. It was fun at first because there was a huge group of us moving down the sidewalk in slow motion and everyone was staring at us and asking us what was going on but we couldn't talk. But an hour is an incredibly long time to spend walking around one block. And we were supposed to do three of these in three different places. So after that one off we headed to a small block right downtown. This time we went in single file so that we were surrounding the entire block and we went incredibly slowly because we were spending the same amount of time on a block half or a quarter of the size. This time it was torture. Nobody was enjoying it, everyone was getting cold. It was terrible. And then it finishes and we head off to the next one. But there was no way I was going to do that again so I was relieved when my teacher said she couldn't stay for it and didn't expect us to. I am now incredibly sore, incredibly tired, and a bit confused as to what we just did and why.

So what crazy things did you guys do today?