Thursday, Feb. 10th: Work Day/Mini-Critique.

Today for me was mostly a work day to catch up with everyone else. I feel like I been missing all the most important classes, so I talked to my teacher Sam and we worked It out so that while everyone else was having a mini class critique I could stay In the darkroom and get some printing done. It was kind of relaxing being in the darkroom with the radio on by myself, and one of the mentors would come in every so often to check up on me. I know the whole process of developing photos in the darkroom now and I'm happy to say I pretty much got the hang of the whole thing(:

I find myself getting impatient sometimes waiting for the photo to go through the fixer, which only takes about 3-4 minutes but seems like forever in the darkroom, especially If your by yourself, like I was today. After class was over a stayed a little longer to help clean up since I was, after all, the last and only one that used that side of the darkroom. The way we clean up Is we dump out all the already used chemicals (developer, stop bath, etc..) except for with the fixer we take this little dropper thing and pour a couple drops of this stuff into the fixer to see If It Is still good to pour back in the bottle and use again. The fixer will turn into a very dark purple the instant the first or second drop touch's the fixer, and that's how to tell If It's bad or not. And still working on my "Identity & Community" assignment as well as my "self-portrait" assignment, which was due awhile ago but I had forgotten that I already had film In my camera and so I was going to put a new roll In there and accidentally exposed all five of my self-portraits along with the rest of the film. But shh, It's really okay because I needed the extra time to work on my self-portrait anyways, hahaha.

Tuesday, Feb 8th: Photo Postcards.

Got here a little bit early today because my bus was on time for once. That gave me and my friend San (who was also early) about an extra half hour to work in the darkroom. Since I turned in a couple rolls of film last Thursday I was able to work with a lot more then before. My assignment was to pick an object and observe It for 24 hours. The object I chose was an empty pack of cigarettes. I took it around town with me and shot photos of It everywhere that I usually see them. I'm still getting used to using a film camera so some of my pictures were either to bright, because of the flash, or to blurry.

In class I was working on this one photo of my two twin kitty's staring each other down and getting ready to fight. The funny thing about this photo was it was an accident. I had the roll of film I was suppose to use for my object assignment in my camera, I was originally going to take a photo of the pack of cigarettes beside an ashtray on the table, when all the sudden my cats come running out and pause right in front of my photo. So of course my first instinct was to snap that photo right there. And the cats ended up being more in focus then the pack of cigarettes, haha. I probably made close to around 20 copies of that photo, trying to get It right each time, before I finally gave up and  decided to start working on a photo to use for my postcards. The photo I might potentially be using for the postcard images is a photo I took in this pet store located in Burien. It Is a photo of a cute little bird, hanging upside-down in a small box like glass cage. The bird in my photo looks a lot like a silhouette which I think makes It a whole lot more interesting :)

Well anyways, enough talk for today, our assignment for the next week is called "Identity and Community."