How Much Me

I started yet another script today, and this is the one I'll be presenting on Friday. This one is a little more grounded, and I feel comfortable going on with it. What I realized today was that my writing has a style. And when I noticed it, I realized that that is what I wanted, a style. Patterns in my writing are proof that I exist! If I have my own style, I can be okay with making things that are not replicas of my influences. This is often the temptation when you like someone else's art very much. Just try to do exactly what that artist did, and then you'll be good. But if I have my own style, I don't have to worry, because I'll show up in it no matter what. I am not free of worry about this script though. I might know my issues a little too well, and they may get in there a little too literally. In fact, this script is a literal-metaphorical depiction of my life at this moment. What a narcissist I am! I need to pay attention to story before meaning. I think this is going to be the main idea behind my editing, but I'll see what my community has to say. I also need to work on my characters. It's easy to write myself as a character, it's not so easy to write other people in. I know what works for me- I need to have a clear vision of my people. I don't need to know that a character eats oatmeal for breakfast and played tennis as a kid, I just need to get some image of her in my head. Or else she's going to come out as me, the default image. Hope to get something good out of this!

Not A Good Day

Writing the beginning of this play is scaring me out of writing the end of it. I have started two separate plays, and so far neither of them are good. They're not well written, and I would fix the writing if I thought the ideas were worth continuing with. On both plays, I got the idea, thought it was pretty good, started writing, and realized it wasn't. And then had no motivation to continue. But what I noticed is that they are bad for the same reason. They are both rooted in something unreal, and I'm getting lost in the details I need to justify it. For example (I'm embarrassed to even say this idea), one of them had to do with a person calling her past self on the phone once the technology for this has been created. What was I thinking? Then I had to wonder, in this world, is this technology available to everyone? So is everyone in the past world getting called from people in the future? And then there's the issue that it wouldn't technically be her past self because she never got a call from her own future self. And how far back in time do the calls go? By the time this is all explained, won't the listener be bored? But if it's not explained, will it make any sense? I might be thinking too far into this but my script wanted me to answer these questions and I didn't know how. Then I didn't even like the idea anymore, so why bother? I don't feel like a good writer anymore. I don't have any ideas, and I don't have any discipline. I know that I need to just keep doing it and doing it, but I'm holding myself to too high a standard and it's making it hard for me to live up to myself. I've been approaching art the same way I've been approaching everything else in my life, negatively and with minimal effort. How can I call myself a writer when I'm hardly writing anything? I want to be going faster and getting more done on this, but I keep starting over or gonig back to research. I just want an idea now that is rooted in reality so that I don't have to worry about those silly explanations that make things hard for me.

First Draft

Whenever we watch moves in Stac, I walk out feeling differently. Watching Andy Warhol today was an exercise for my brain. I knew that it was going to be. I mentioned my four envy in my last post. It's the part of my enneagram that I've been finding most helpful to my self awareness. Fours have the habit of believing that everybody else has something we don't. We are extremely envious. I related a lot to an interview with a four who said that he went to an artist's studio and saw all his work and was deeply touched by it but rather than being able to appreciate it in the moment, he envied the artist and wished he could do the same. That's how I felt watching Warhol today. Not that I was especially in love with his art, but I was extremely envious of his work ethic. He seemed to always be working and he always enjoy working. I was also envious of his ambition. He wanted fame, and he got fame. I want to know what I want so that I can get it. But I'm trying to turn my envy into something productive. And after watching Andy Warhol today, I was inspired to make art. I'm biased, but it seemed to me that Andy was a four. He had the extreme envy and the extreme self doubt. But he worked past it, so I can too. I've been struggling to decide on a college. After watching the documentary today, I wanted to go to Oberlin. When I was at home on Facebook, I wanted to go to Binghamton. So I typed a bunch of random letters into a word doc, copied and pasted them into the "New Password" box, printed the word doc, ripped off the little corner with the password on it, and slipped it in a box of my grandma's hats on the top shelf of my closet. I have got to pick a side of me. Closest to my ideal. By the time it's too hard or not right, I'll have a new ideal. I want to get used to not sticking to one place or one kind of place. I need to keep in motion. So when I came home from track, I took a shower and then my parents wanted to take me out to dinner to celebrate my college decision. I was antsy to get started writing, but I said yes because I wanted them to feel good. When I got home, I knew I had to get started. And I did! I started writing, and the first few things I wrote were not good but I eventually got an idea I liked enough to roll with. I don't think it's going to be the final concept, but I want to see where it takes me. Frankly, I'm proud of myself for even starting something. I've been so... fearful lately that I haven't been able to start a single thing. This project is going to mean a lot to me. If I do a good job on it, I'll have the courage to keep starting new things. I want to always be making something.

Browsing Radio Shows

I'm thinking about from which direction to approach my project. The first things I know are the form and the "aboutness". But I'm wondering now how to justify the form that I chose. Why a radio play and not a movie? What must the story and the style be so that I am justified in doing it this way? But I think this is the wrong way to approach it. I can use my need for sound as inspiration, but I should not use it to throw away ideas. As the line between life and art is thin, I'm finding what I hope this project will do for me. I need to work on confidence and plowing through. I am not confident in my ideas. When I have ideas, they are not concrete, they are abstract. They often go back to "aboutness" rather than pure content. So starting this project will be key. I need to get something concrete, so I will have to approach it in a different way. I've been writing poems to get a flow, and to get something concrete to look at, but I will have to move faster. I spent today listening to several radio episodes, most notably Radiolab. Radiolab uses sound differently from the episode I was originally inspired by. It is audibly interesting. A story is told by multiple voices, and I enjoyed the way the voices interacted. There was a mixture of conversational and narrative speaking. I could hear that each reaction "hmm" and "ah, yes" was considered, and played a role in setting the tone. Music and sound effects were also utilized. So this tells me that it doesn't matter how I use sound or if sound is the center of the story. Rather, I can come up with my story and then bring in sound and use the need for sound as inspiration and a tool for changing it around. So I can stop trying to think of how to incorporate answering machines and voice recorders. Aside from the way Radiolab used sound, I was also gripped by the story itself. It was about a scientist who learned from his mentor to be objective when trying to make sense out of his subjects, crickets, and their actions. When that mentor was shot and killed in a senseless act by a man who was never caught, the scientist could not find a way to look at the case objectively. He couldn't understand how someone could harm another human being that way. The most understanding that came was when a Vietnam veteran explained that he and the woman who'd been with his mentor could never understand. It was a beautiful story beautifully done. My 4 envy came out when I heard it! Hopefully I can use it as motivation and not a reason to quit.

Radio Project Begins

I was inspired by the NPR podcast about the blind date and the answering machine to write my own script and record it. I'm having some trouble deciding what I would like it to be about. I always start with what it is I'm thinking about right now. So that brought me to the idea of my relationship with the future and my future self. I'm also thinking about idealism, which is easily a part of the future theme. So it will circle somehow around this. I'm doing this because I'm interested in sound and music as well as writing, and I've never gotten to consider these things very much with writing. I'm unsure whether to start with the story or with the sound. I've got a bit of a case of the "I can't do any better than the first thing I heard and loved" syndrome, but I'm pushing through it! Today in class I was reading Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood is a play written for voices, and although there was no conventional storyline, I was completely drawn in because the language and imagery were so beautiful. Because it's a play of sounds, it's important that the imagery is very rich. The sounds of the words are also important because they have an effect on the mood and the style. So these are some things I'll have to consider when I write it. Unlike the Facebook project last year, I'm anxious to get out of the research stage and get started, so I'd say that's a good sign that I'm feeling enthusiastic about this one.

Individual

The playwriting intensive worked progressively in the sense that it was first about raw technique with little attention to creativity and ended with loose instructions allowing us to pull together our improved technique with creativity. This is not to say that no creativity was involved in the earlier workshops, but the need for it was minimized so that we could focus on the specific aspect of playwriting we were working to improve on. I found the intensive to be successful for this reason. The sense of jetting through in the earlier workshops followed through to the later ones that required more of a thought process.
The assignment for the first intensive illustrates this minimization of thought process. We were to think up the last argument we’d had and write it as a six page play. Knowing my own weakness in making decisions, I picked the first long fight I could remember and chose to write that one. I didn’t try to make it the best script it could be, but rather I turned on autopilot and wrote it just as it came to mind. The challenge came when we then had to cut down the six page script to a three page script. To do this, I examined what was at the core of the six page script. The script I was writing was a fight between a girl and her mother over beer found in the girl’s closet. When refining the script, I strived to maintain the essence of the first script rather than something more superfluous like its details or structure. Some details and structure elements were used to maintain the essence, but they were not the thing to keep in mind. At the core of my characters was the mother’s desire to keep her daughter young and the daughter’s need for freedom, so this was what I tried to keep in the three page script and then again when refining it down to a one page script.
The next assignment followed naturally. It again required an ability to find the essence of the script and of the characters’ motives. We were to write two different versions of an apology. The first would be direct, and the second would be indirect, meaning rather than a straightforward apology, the apology would be more implied. This approach would most likely yield a more realistic scene. However, because the original scene had been written about a real fight that I’d had and that was never fully resolved, I couldn’t get myself to write an apology. So the art entered the intensive very early for me, and this workshop taught me more of a lesson of separation. Had I been able to separate myself from the script, I would have been able to write an apology. In art, there is not a thick line between the personal and the universal, and this day of the workshop reminded me of this. It is okay for work to be personal, as long as you can keep some separation from it.
That day turned from a product day to a research day, and I read Clifford Odets’ Rocket to the Moon. Odets seems to be the master of characters. I was surprised at how much I understood about his characters that was only implied. This gave me a little more confidence that I could say more with less. I found his writing to be both believable and poetic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Odets

Slowly, the workshops became looser and allowed for some more creativity. The next thing we did was write three scenes from the life of an object, and this was written in the form of a screenplay. This exercised two areas. First, as a screenplay, I was forced to consider visuals. Although this is perhaps more important in a screenplay than in a stage play, I found that even my dialogue improved when writing in this form. Because I wrote it by seeing it in my head rather than thinking up appropriate dialogue, it came off more realistic and simply better. In this workshop, I was also drawing on what I’d done previously. I looked for the essence of each scene before writing it and then was able to construct interesting dialogue that got across interesting relationships between complex characters.
The art really came into the intensive with the assignment to write a play based on song lyrics which we were given. The only other limitations were on the number of characters and the length of the play. With fewer limitations, it is always more difficult to begin, and I needed a little push to get started. Here I encountered the lesson that it has been my goal to keep in my head, which is that inspiration can and should be taken from anywhere, and it does not matter if the final outcome of a piece of work matches the inspiration. It will match no matter what. In comes the idea of the universal. I didn’t especially like the script I wrote for this part of the intensive. It started with a hole that I never figured out how to close. It began with a girl hiding in a closet and a boy curious why she was there, and that question was never answered. What I did like about it was its poetic feel. I was trying to mimic Odets in this sense. I think that I as a writer appeared in this script stylistically more than I did in the others. In this way, this script came at an appropriate time. After learning to write interesting dialogue in an effective manner, I suppose the next step would be to establish a style.
Another playwright we studied was Harold Pinter, and we focused on adopting his use of pauses and silences for points of tension. I found this exercise to be very difficult to write with, but very useful when directing. After the intensive, I directed one of the scenes I had written and I found it was easier to employ the pauses when I was able to see the scene happening before me and sense where they belonged. This shows me that directing scenes will also help me improve my writing. Hopefully I will learn to get the feel for the pauses and silences enough so that I can see it in my head and write them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/arts/dance/10pint.html?pagewanted=all
The challenge of writing these scenes grew steadily as I had to take the techniques I’d learned in the early workshops and use them all together, but it felt like it happened naturally and that the techniques were somewhat engrained in my head because I had already used them. I am pleased with how much writing got done throughout the intensive, and what I took away from it was that it is not enough to know but you must use what you know in order to improve.

Writing Intensive 1

The process of cutting down the scripts made a lot of sense. It was difficult to extend it to six pages in the first place, and so I think I started to get repetitive with the issues I was talking about. This did actually happen in the fight I wrote about as fights do tend to go around in circles. In the second script, I had to lose this round effect in order to get all the issues in, but I think if I were to try to recreate this scene in a play, I might try to get the endlessness aspect to come out a little bit more. When writing the second script, I looked at the first one and outlined what the main ideas were.

They were:
-lack of trust
-comparison between me and my brother
-strongmindedness
-seeing only the bad and not the good
-freedom

So in the second script, I tried to include each of these things. In the last, one page script, I took the one idea that I felt showed the motivation behind the whole fight. The fight was about my desire to have more freedom conflicting with my mother's desire to keep me under her control. The other things all fell under this category anyway. Lack of trust was her way of justifying taking away my freedom. The comparison between me and my brother was my way of expressing angst about my individuality. I took her criticism of me very personally. And my strongmindedness was what she feared because it represented my maturity and even my confidence in forces that she did not believe in.
It would be interesting to see the way my mother would have diluded my original script because my interpretation is definitely in my favor.

Expressionism & Thoughts on Art

Expressionist art brings a connection to the spiritual world. I think that it gives credit to emotions for being the purest indicators of the soul. Emotions are real and out of our control. We can change what we know, but we can't change how we feel. The expressionist pieces we saw today don't attempt to mimic reality too closely. This makes perfect sense because reality is unsure. I do not see the same reality as the person next to me. Expressionism seems to see emotions, not reality, as our connection to each other and to art. I remember doing a STACapedia article on Munch. His paintings had an obvious emotional quality. You know exactly how it feels. The film with the man with the balloons, the operas, and the Bunto dancing each seemed to have a uniform emotional quality, as if they were projections of a single emotion.

Thinking about expressionism today brought me closer to a definition of art. I've heard that art is the language of the soul, and I believe it makes more sense to me right now than to many of the people who have said it. As a writer, language is a huge interest of mine, and I understand that language rises from necessity. The better humans communicate, the more efficient we are and the faster we have advanced. But we all have an inner world that we can never communicate with near close to perfect accuracy.
We talk about this in acting. When I see you, I don't see you how you see yourself. I see what I feel and what I know about you. But how much can I know? I was thinking- how much others know about me, THAT is how accurately I look at other people. I don't think others know anything about me, and I don't think anyone knows much about anyone. Art is like when a group of teenagers sits around and admits to each other the weird things they do when they're alone, and they feel their actions are validated. But the language we speak only gets us so far. I cannot explain to another person what my world looks like or what I look like to myself. But when they see my art, they are seeing it. The validation is in the fact that they can find some meaning in it. That is where our inner worlds connect. It is unspoken, and it is beautiful, and that is why art is important.

I'm not saying laziness wasn't a factor in my lack of blogging the past few weeks, but several times I've considered it and then stopped because all I want to talk about is relationship problems. Life's really hard!
Anyway, I thought my group's Be Kind Rewind was a big success. The function of the activity certainly has evolved since my sophomore year. The first year we did them, they were all really funny and pretty well done. The past two years, they've been less well done and funny in a different way. This is okay! The past two years, I've gotten a lot out of the projects. My group's movie didn't get a lot of laughs; we ended up coming up with something pretty dark and serious. What's good is it took us only three days in Stac to come up with a pretty solid idea for a movie! Had I just sat around thinking of a movie to make, I might never get an idea so solid. Also, after making a little sketch of the movie, we were already forced to work out some holes. Snow White Trash started out as a Be Kind Rewind, and I think this movie is going to be a good one once we make it!

I'm at one of those crossroad times of my life. I'm starting to feel all the fallbacks of being young. I never thought I'd want to grow up, but fall can't come soon enough, and winter is just as welcome. I started senior year feeling too old to still be here. It's the classic teenage syndrome; we're all trying to grow up too fast. Adults criticize us for it, but I figure if we're all doing it, it can't be all wrong. My boyfriend broke up with me after he left for college. I guess that's adding a lot of fuel to my fire. My mom is hesitant for me to get my driver's license. I understand my curfew, but I don't understand my curfew. A year before I go away to college, I better be able to take care of myself. But if I'm able to take care of myself, why do I have so many people I have to answer to? Again, I get it, but I don't. I'm having a hard time being happy right now. I'll never write somebody off for being dramatic about a breakup. It is quite a fair reason to be upset. One good thing about not being happy is everything is at least a little exciting and different for a while. For example, I've been talking to myself a little more often, and I haven't really done that in a while. I'm even saying all these words as I type them while I listen to some sad music and it's making me feel a little better. We should all learn to be comforted by our own voices because they won't go away, and they are pretty powerful. They remind us that we can create something outside of ourselves, sound, and we can make somebody hear us, which isn't as good as making somebody listen but it's better than not being heard at all. I've also had to be a little more conscious lately because I'm trying to keep some things off of my mind, and I can't do it without putting in some effort. Things I used to dread are now little blessings, like having a lot of homework so that I can distract myself as long as possible. I also get to look at things from a different point of view. The point of view of somebody who is heartbroken turns out to be very different from the point of view of somebody who is really happy and in love, go figure. So nothing is really old anymore, everything is kind of new. Everything evokes different thoughts and feelings than before. I don't like looking at happy couples anymore. You'd be surprised how many there are on TV; I thought that sitcoms focused a little more on the arguments in marriages and relationships. As it turns out, there's a whole lot of happy in there! I hope I can remember that when I start wanting to see happy couples on TV again! They're all over town too, and all around the school.
So I guess the reason people make art when they're sad is because they're seeing everything in a new light, and all of a sudden there are a million things to say and nothing to do but say them.
I'm supposed to be figuring out where I'm going to apply to college now; I don't really know what to do with that. It seems like a big game to me, and I can't really take it seriously. In my Psych class the other day, Mr. McManus had a fake homework quiz in which he gave the directions, "On pages 25, there was a diagram. Try to replicate that diagram on your paper to the best of your ability." The point was, of course, that no one knew it, and after we all talked about how we felt about it. That's how I feel when confronted with this college thing. Are you really asking me to apply to a bunch of futures and then pick one? And do it all over the computer? Right here in my little swivel chair where I'm writing this blog post? It's hard to take it seriously. Something's telling me there's nothing more worthwhile to me right now than listening to jazz and browsing the internet.
I'm not just a thing with tasks, I'm a person, and I know what's best for me, and getting everything done exactly when I'm told to is not always the most important thing. I'm not giving up; I'm still motivated. I'm just trying to relax and make life a little easier. I feel alright right now.

The Perfect Circle!

Doing the mural today, I became aware of whatever fearlessness I've gained since my first year in Stac. I was quick and certain and never once wanted to erase! I even really enjoyed doing it. I actually came to some unexpected endings. I was never one to look back at a free writing exercise and come across things I forgot about writing, but that's what it felt like today. I learned that I connect love to hope to religion and somehow to perfection! Yes, what we did today actually helped me figure out what may be at the core of everything on my mind right now. I'm a perfectionist! I see the world as too complicated for me to handle. I don't modify the world to make it perfect, I modify my mind to believe it already is. On a bigger scale, I'm wondering if we all live in our perfects worlds. Can we survive knowing that the world isn't perfect? Is perfection not the impossible thing, but the only thing?
I'm figuring this out as I go along, and the answer is yes! We are all perfect in our own world. We can't help it. Everything I do changes my world just as everything my world does changes me. This goes on in a perfect circle.

And so begins my last year in Stac. It's a stranger feeling than I thought being a senior. I'm half wondering what I'm still doing here, a quarter grateful everything hasn't changed just yet, and a whole lot of a jumbled up mixture of everything that I know would connect if I just took so time to think about it.
I'm at a weird point in my life. I haven't accomplished much over the summer aside from being okay with not accomplishing anything (which for me is an accomplishment). I have this weird new confidence where I'm pretty sure I'm a genius but I don't want to get my hopes up. I think I'm getting something about life that I didn't always get. I have a new philosophy that I haven't quite located yet, a kind of determinism that is not in conflict with free will. I've begun to look at things as though everything is as it should be and nothing can be otherwise. We make decisions, but we could not have decided otherwise because we decide based on who we are and what we've experienced and everything in our lives that has led up to that decision. It's making me a little more alright with the world. It's making me start to love the world.
It's helping the way I look at art. Art requires an acceptance of the way the world is. Everything in the world could not be if it weren't for everything else. So art has to be everything at once. Every piece of art is the entire world, even if it's only addressing one aspect.
I stopped doing my daily practice. This was part of my new religion of acceptance. I had to accept that it was over. The idea of having one goal to begin with each quarter excites me immensely! Since my sophomore year, I've wanted to write and direct a play, and this year I'm going to do it. And I'm saying it so certainly so that if anyone catches me not doing it you can try to help me out by putting me back in line. It's that time of year when I feel that need to make art; I need to get it out of my system, out of my brain and somewhere I can see it.
I'm anxious for this year to be on its way. I hope to get to know all of you soon.

As for a daily practice, I want to read. Suggestions to start off with?

Workshop #2

Monday, we critiqued the work of those who had brought in work to be critiqued. Critiquing other people's writing is a thing I've always enjoyed; it was pointed out to me that I'm good at noticing flaws. I think I have a good ear for good writing. When it comes time to having my own work critiqued, it won't be quite as fun. I don't know why I get such joy in searching for flaws, but since it was addressed, I've noticed that it is a thing I tend to do. I don't think of myself as a negative person anymore. I think I look at the world in an extremely positive way for how realistically I approach it. I don't think I'm predisposed to look for flaws everywhere. I think I look for good things where I think I'm supposed to like it and bad things when I think I'm not. I've noticed lately that I have trouble forming my own opinions on things and filtering out other opinions I've heard of what is biased or up for debate. That sounds really bad. At the same time, I must be forming my own opinions on who is credible who's opinion is worth considering. Still, there was a time a little while ago when two of the people who's opinions I regarded perhaps higher than anyone's disagreed on a topic extremely relevant to me, and since then I've been struggling with this issue of who to listen to and who to trust. The way I've dealt with it is by trying to find uniform factors in both sides so I can try to make sense of it.

Workshop #1

The workshop today was a little slow. We didn't do any writing like I thought we would. Reed seems to have a very different approach to writing than I've seen. He emphasizes entertainment value over meaning. I always think that if the meaning part is nailed, entertainment will come along with it. He also lost me a little when he was talking about how every novel is a mystery novel and started to list novels that have murders in them. That didn't make too much sense to me. It started to make sense to me when he explained that all novels were mystery novels because they all answer the same four questions. Who am I? Why am I here? How did I get here? What does it mean?
His way of finding inspiration was interesting to me too. He uses newspaper stories. This was cool to me. We've learned a lot of ways to come up with ideas in STAC. He had the same attitude that writer's block or any kind of artist's block is just an excuse.
Today was a lot of basic stuff, but I'm really excited to get started with this first chapter assignment. I've never tried writing a novel before, so I'm excited to jump into it.

Lighting Day 5

The fifth lighting workshop was really really fun for me. I love getting specific instructions and knowing exactly what I'm supposed to do. It also gave us a chance to try a bunch of different things, and since this entire time, I've been waiting to get a chance to really get to shoot some photographs, I was super happy to do so. The biggest dilemma Matt and I had was finding a way to photograph the cafeteria for an article about dangerous spills on the floor when there was no spill on the floor. Then we saw a bucket and a mop and figured out how to shoot that, and I was pretty impressed with myself for thinking of it. It's like solving a puzzle. I also really liked shooting the art workshop; people look really interesting when they're working on sculptures. I enjoyed the variety. Even shooting the ceiling was fun.

Lighting Day 4

Friday, we started to learn how to use whatever light available to take a good photo rather than lights we can control. It's the same concept, using exactly what you have. What you have is just different. I like the idea that it is possible to get a photo in ANY location. I thought about it, and this is going to be the most useful to me considering that I will not have a mobile light source or any other equipment when taking most of the photos I will take in my lifetime. I was a little overwhelmed by all of the variables that affect the best way for a portrait to be taken. The shape of the person's face, their eyes, basically every other feature they have, the background, the light, anything interesting that's around. Then there's all of the different things on the camera to adjust and in the layout to adjust to make it all work together. I definitely want a lot more practice with it.

Lighting Day 3

Today, none of our equipment was up to par. We didn't have a camera, so we used a video camera. Our lights were weak. Our reflector was just a big white board. We didn't have a "gobo," so we hung a board and a jacket from hangers. The only real piece of equipment we did have was a round reflector, and it was all old and flimsy. And it couldn't have been cooler when we got a decent photo out of it! It was a great way to get an idea of the difference between what we as people see and what the camera sees. We saw a big old blanket being held up behind a model with hangers balancing on poles all around her, but the camera sees just her face with a dark background. I like the control that we had, and how easy it was to attain with whatever resources we had at hand.

Lighting Day 2

The most important thing I'll probably have gotten out of the second day of the workshop is knowing what F stop and shutter speed do and how to use them. I never thought of a camera as a brain so much as I did on Friday. It's not exactly like a human brain, but it is like a brain! It does far more things than I realized it could. You have to know how to work with it and also how to trick it because, like human brains, they can be fooled! They are intended to be tricked. Having known nothing about cameras before, I was happy to learn some of the basics and try to put them into practice.

Lighting Day 1

I found the basic lighting stuff we learned today remarkably interesting. I've seen a million lights in my lifetime, but it turned out I didn't really know a thing about them. Just the technical stuff like how to make a light harsher or softer and that quantity of light doesn't make a difference really interested me. It was amazing how dramatically lights affect a picture. Later, I was sitting in my living room and looking up at the chandelier, and I started to wonder why a light fixture would be designed to be so stationary when placement and arrangement of how a light is set up could give a room so many different personalities or feelings. What also interested me was how each technique and each principle could be explained with what the sun does. Photography, and especially lighting in photography, is just like what I always say about poetry. It mimics nature; the best poem represents something just as it is, staying as close to nature as possible, and a good photograph does the same. I don't mean the best photographs are of birds in trees; I hope I'm explaining this well. Anyway, I'm genuinely excited for the next workshop!

ROB

Rob Goldman is a noted photographer who's been published internationally. He is also the author of the book
Shooting From the Heart: Creating Passion and Purpose in Your Life and Work. Many big magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Time have contained his work. Rob has organized personal development programs with a focus on the artist and the person as a whole. His workshops are typically conducted for the education, business, art, and yoga communities. In these programs, he explores the integration of the energies of the body, mind, and spirit. Rob also serves on the board of Photographic Imaging Program at Suffolk Community college and is co-founder of Oyster Bay Gallery Art That Matters.