Digital is for those Afraid of the Dark Room...

I started school on Wednesday, and I am actually really nervous about this class. I am taking Photo II this semester. The first class was pretty much just going over the grading system and the syllabis. A new addition to the first day is also an evacuation talk in case of a school shooting. SLCC has added locks inside all of the classroom doors now, so in case of a shooting, we can lock ourselves in. I guess there was a study done about Virginia Tech, and someone said that one class might have lived if they had had the ability to lock the door. Anyways, my teacher carries the key in his bag and he showed us where it was and gave us permission to get into his bag to get it if for any reason he isn't able to do it himself. I can't believe that we have to talk about this now, but going to school somehow became a dangerous thing to do. Back to my actual class, I feel like I am already really behind. It doesn't seem like my last teacher ended off where this one is starting. I am going to have to do a bit of catch up. He asked if anyone had done color slides before, and I never have. I also have never developed anything on fiber paper, but that is the requirement this time around. Then, halfway through, we are switching to digital. Since my nice camera with full manual controls is a film camera, digitial is definitely my weak point. Everyone else in my class is the exact opposite. There isn't anyone in my class that had my same teacher for Photo I. I was lucky that I didn't have to buy a new book this year, since I already had to buy it for Photo I, but we never used it, so everyone else has already been using it for a year now except for me. The only thing that I feel I have up on anyone else is that I have had to mount my pictures before, and no one else in the class has.

Day 2 for my class was today. I got my 30 pages of reading done, gathered my pictures together from my Photo I class as required by my teacher so he can "see where we are at", got my supplies (57 dollars later) and took a roll of film to develop in the lab today. During the lecture, my teacher called on me to answer a question about how you define shapes in a photo, and I didn't have an answer for him. I just had to tell him that I didn't know in front of the entire class. Later, during the actual lab, I messed up on developing my film. I only did that once last year, and it wasn't nearly this bad! I guess in my defense, it has been about a year since I have done it, but now I have to re-shoot my roll of film and start over. At first, I felt really confident about being in the darkroom again. It was something familiar and something that I thought I was good at. Unfortunately, when I was loading my film into the canister to develop it, I got a kink in it, so most of my film was touching another part somewhere else. Then when I was processing it, all the developer couldn't get to most of is, so it mostly just came out blank, like I didn't do anything to it at all.

I don't know what it wrong with me. I just don't feel as confident about my photography as I have in the past. It just seems like there is always another photographer that can take the same pictures as me but better. And they probably won't mess up the developing of their film later. I'm sure I'll catch up, but I kind of hate that I have to. I hate feeling like everyone already knows something that I don't, so I have to resort to a book teaching me instead of my instructor. I just wish that it came as easily to me as it did before.