Believe it or not…school has me so busy that I haven’t had time to shoot for myself! Amazing, right?

When I’m not in class, I live in the library, and when I’m not in the library, I’m in the darkroom. Or sleeping. Not really sleeping that much though

No complaints though; this is the first time I’m in a program where I’m truly excited about going to class, and I really look forward to learning about everything that we discuss. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my time at Howard, but I really REALLY loved my electives and running around campus with a camera around my neck a teensy bit more

Right now, I’m taking a Contemporary Art class and it’s refreshing to read about the artists whose work I’ve seen in the Hirshhorn when we lived up north. Somewhere on a hard drive are photos from the Hirshhorn I never got around to posting here; when I’m back in the DC/Metro area, I’ll definitely pay a visit

So I’ve gotten a handful of Wandering shots since we’ve been here on digital. As soon as I figure out the monster that is the film scanner I’ll post some of my shots from my large format class (no, really, it looks like something out of the Jetsons and I am afraid I’ll do something bad, like break it and have to promise my first born to offset the replacement cost).

Here’s one of the few:

And here’s one from today. My assignment for Large Format was to find a large format photographer whose work I admire and try to interpret some of their work in my own photos. Josef Sudek has this beautiful photograph of an egg on a plate (I can’t find a picture of it at the moment), and I tried to set up the shot but um…

…rolled right off the table and smacked against the wall! Luckily, the egg didn’t crack open and make a mess on the carpet, so I shot it as it was, broken but still holding it all together. Kinda symbolic, right?

Oh, and I sustained my first large format camera injury of the quarter! In my last large format class, my hair got caught on the rise and fall controls of the camera (which is why I’ve learned never to rock my curly-fro when shooting!). This time around…my finger (one of the good ones! the right middle…) decided to hang around in a bad part of the tripod and it got smushed, and it hurt so bad I yelped from under the dark cloth, and now I’m freaking out about it turning a different color! I guess things could have been worse…I could have caught my hair AND smashed my finger…:) How we suffer for our art, right?

And nope…I haven’t taken the obligatory city skyline night shot. Hopefully I can come up for air this week and get a chance to!

I’ve missed you. You were stolen away from me almost two weeks ago and made me have lots of doubt in men with utility belts that traipse about Atlanta in Comcast vans. I considered making the library and computer lab my second home, but…I think security will give me the boot if I show up with a sleeping bag and Elmo slippers.

It’s going to be a slow healing of sorts. I keep looking at your connection in disbelief, as if the damage has been too traumatic for me to grasp that the modem WORKS and is communicating with the router.

Until about a minute ago, I was about to type out this blog post from my Blackberry. I told you, the healing would be slow.

No photos in this entry. I just wanted to say hey, again, and I hope that we can start over as friends.

And no…we’re not wired for FIOS. Sadly. I hear Mr. FIOS will never let me down.

Wow…we all just witnessed history.

There have been other moments in this past year where at the moment, I was brimming with words, but unable to lay them out when I accessed this blank screen with its blinking cursor. It was as if the words ran away to some private part of me, until the right time came.

Because I do what I do for a living, I couldn’t help but observe everyone with cameras, civilians and senators alike. Is photography not an amazing medium? How important is a memory to you? I also smiled to myself seeing Malia Obama recording her father’s inaugural speech with her digital camera. Also, Elizabeth Alexander’s poem was beautiful. I love how poetry makes you stop and absorb each word, the nuance of language, the beauty in imagery. Once I come across a transcript, I’ll be sure to post it here.

While I would have preferred to have been standing on the crunchy grass along the mall (or better yet, a little closer to the Capitol, with a press credential around my neck), freezing my digits off while snapping away , I’m grateful that my professor was kind enough to let us miss class to see the feed in our audi-cafe-teri-um. With tears in my eyes, and watching Barack Obama take his oath of office, I thought about the power of possibility. Of a tiny woman who dared to sit on a bus seat painted over with a psychological barrier; of a man who knew he might not make it to a world where black and white could coexist peacefully; the nerve of wanting to be the change we all seek in this world.

When I was of sound intelligence to think about it, I mulled over the possibility of seeing someone who looks like me taking the oath of the most important job in the country. Often, I met my own optimism with doubt. You see, my father grew up in rural Alabama in a very critical time; when he fell in love with my mother, they were met with a lot of opposition. Their history made me have a lot of doubt in possibility of certain things happening in my lifetime.

This is my opportunity, to very kindly, but very sternly, tell myself to shut up. Doubt can be such poison at times; limiting you and muffling your attempt to be that trickle of water in a parched desert, that revolution in a room full of stale air.

The Obamas not only had hope, but confidence to follow through with that hope. If this isn’t a testament to be brave and dare to do all the things you at some point doubted you could do, I don’t know what is.

We must also be reminded that yes, while this is a day of reflection, it is also a day of understanding our minimum responsibility to serve our communities, support, encourage and help one another.

This is a movement more than a moment.

I did it! I survived grad school! *jumps up and down*

Now, a list of my numerous ‘freshman moments:’

-getting lost repeatedly on campus (in building? we’re only 1.5 buildings…but it’s quite easy to get lost)

-walking around for 10 minutes looking for a bathroom when I drank like a gallon of water. let’s just say it was a brisk walk!

-not being able to get my locker open…just realized today that I’m supposed to pull the latch OUT, not up

-losing my car in the parking garage. the security guard drove me around to the place where I parked it, which looked IDENTICAL to the place where I THOUGHT I parked it. he said new students do it all the time, which brought down my DPI (Dork Perception Index) down 2%.

I’m pretty sure there will be more to come as the quarter progresses, but really, I’m so glad I’m here. The professors have already blown my mind with the knowledge they’ve dropped and it’s only the first week! I feel like a sponge soaking up everything and my pen can’t write fast enough. The quarter system is definitely different from anything I’ve ever experienced education-wise in my adult life (um I have papers due NEXT WEEK ALREADY AUUUUGH!) but I wanted this so I’m going to do the best I can.

oh and guess what guess what guess what?

Remember when I said I was really fond of working with a large format camera and was sad to part with it at the end of the semester? Welp…I’m taking the class again and this is Behemoth II! I’m glad that I’m going to have the opportunity to work with a LF camera again now that I’m a little less rusty with it.

(hopefully. it took me 20 minutes to load the film holders today. I used to be able to do it in under 10 minutes. but hold up hold up…I was updating my Facebook status in the changing room from my Blackberry and then was on the Google making sure I remembered exactly *how* to load the film dooflitchey correctly…so that means 20-2 minutes for the F-book status update thingie – 4 for the Google search means it only took me 14 minutes! Yay!)

*Rolls out chalkboard*

For those of you not familiar with large format photography, it’s a pretty awesome camera system. I’d go into the ABCs of it but I tend to ramble so you can find more information here. I love it because it’s helped me go back to the basics of composition, which is something I think I always can revisit when it comes to my technique. It is without a doubt a practice in patience; from loading the film in total darkness, to seeing the picture you want to take in your mind, to getting it in focus, to taking a light reading, and FINALLY to taking the photo…the entire process is a labor of love of the image. Don’t even get me started on darkroom. Nope, won’t even go there

Large format photography also helped me garner a greater appreciation for landscape and still life photography; Ansel Adams and Edward Weston are among the masters and also two of my favorite photographers (along with like a grillion others! I mean it, a grillion!). A few other notable photographers who used large format are Imogen Cunningham and Richard Avedon.

Though digital camera technology has certainly transformed the photography world, I think it’s always good to know the basics.

This concludes our photography lesson for today! I hope to share some images from this quarter in some later blog posts!