Locked Out

My large format class, Mondays & Wednesdays, is a very hard and difficult class. For the first half of the semester, all we studied was technique, and barely touching the camera to learn for ourselves. Well, now we are in the second half, and we are only using the cameras, barely learning technique. Anyways. Mondays are lecture days, Wednesdays are critique days (where we turn in a matted 11x14 silver gelatin print and get critiqued on it so we can improve.) This is such a hard class because A. we are learning about a completely new camera, if you don't know what a large format or 4x5 camera is, google it, B. this is the first time with this professor who has a completely different style of teaching than the others, C. he is an 'expert' in black & white so our images have to be impeccable before we show them, D. there are only so many dark rom hours, with a LOT of students in our class using it at the same time, so it's hard to get mats cut right, prints done on time and E. he doesn't have any mercy. This class is definitely the reason I decided to just get my B.A. instead of my B.F.A.

Well, last Monday, I was so tired I couldn't get up to go to class, because I had just gotten home from California late that night, and had to clean the house (it's usually clean before we go on trips, but this time Drew didn't come with me), unpack...all of it before going to class. It's kinda a ritual I HAVE to do before continuing with life's schedules. So I DIDN'T go to class Monday, but I of course went on Wednesday, with a print and everything. My professor made a comment like this: "You know, there IS class on Mondays...". The few of us that didn't go kind of shook our heads, like "whatever" and continued. Well today, is Monday, and I came 6 minutes late. 6 minutes LATE! And I come, the door is shut, and these doors automatically lock, and so I knew I would have to knock. I did, and I looked in the slot, and everyone was doing stretches, you know like they have you do in grade school to wake you up and to come out of your sugar low? Yeah, they were doing that. A few of them looked back, and shook their heads and mouthed "sorry, we can't open it". So here I sit. I don't really know why I am still sitting here, I guess in the back of my mind, I am hoping that my teacher will have to run up to his office, and in the meantime, HAVING to converse with me so he can at least feel sorry for my kind soul, and know that 6 minutes late is not bad, I still woke up at 7 to get ready for the day, and I STILL want to be a great photographer. It's too bad I have to pay my so-called-dedicated-to-us-teacher to lock me out.

{ I would really like to expand on my thoughts, but knowing some of my classmates, they would most likely forward this to my professor, just so I could get yelled at about my blog post, so I will keep them inside me. }