dumppppp

So I'm taking Photography this semester and I have all my work from Drawing II last semester, I also coincidentally have a scanner that I fixed (broken belt wheel) so I'm spending the next few days scanning in a helluva lot of stuff and this will be my biggest artdump yet.  I'm really wondering whether I'm going to continue this whole school-driven omniartist charade or finally find that one thing that I love above everything and stick with it- I hope not anyway, I know I'll have to stop doing metal work some day because I'm not going to school forever and I am currently highly dependent on on the school's amazingly equipped studio, which no doubt would cost me tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to make myself.  Thankfully, for a mere $170 a semester I have near unlimited access to their facilities, and you can take Advanced Welded Metal Sculpture as many times as you like, I'm a noob in this level with two others, among an existing populace of 4 'students' who have taken it multiple times.

Weird metal sculpture tangent aside, it's strange not having a drawing class this time around- really even though I love drawing I find my free time spent with my lovely gaming family the PraetoriaGuard and I just have no impetus to draw, unless of course I'm collaborating with the Man's Man that is Cevr, painting of course gun toting vixens (coming soon-ish?)  Just remember dudeman, girls>tennis.  Even the virtual ones.  

But anyway taking a photography class is infinitely fascinating to me- not because I find the simple operation of a camera such, but because I'm doing what I love doing, that is the opposite of an artist who has a medium.  In drawing you have a paper and you have a tool to inscribe an image onto it.  In photography you're working with the image in the first place, and anything you do afterwards is just manipulating the image.  You can only GUIDE the genesis of the image, it is not yours to create.  I know a lot of people will blatantly disagree with me but I think a photographer is an interesting paradox, they require the eye of an artist in order to see the image for what it is and what it can be when context is removed, but they didn't create what they are capturing- someone else did.  This of course leave a GIANT loophole for the people who actually DO make what they shoot from scratch but if you look at the greats of Photography like Ansel Adams it's not like he dynamited a mountain and made Yosemite, or well, Nature itself to expand on the point.

So in my Photography class I'm not really trying to be a good photographer by it's definition- I'm creating the image, not seeking it out.  The Photography part will just be some BS to assuage the Grade-Point-Average gods because there are actual assignments that need me to exercise my grasp on the process of turning the rotate-y thing on the glass tube on the front of the camera and pressing the button-jobby.  Ok yes it's a bit more complex than that and while I was delighted to finally understand what all those confounded numbers are on the camera mean I find all my time in the darkroom is spent in an enlarger booth with my photo sensitive paper and various cool objects to break the light with creating photograms, coming soon.