chimerically

Yesterday my art instructor used me as a model for gesture-drawing. He also had a rant about architecture buildings which I've talked about a bit with my friend studying architecture in Salt Lake City: "On campuses all over the country, architecture buildings are the ugliest. It's like the architects hated their education and want to pass it on. There's no pin-up room in this building! And they just re-did it, and still got it wrong! Go look downstairs. The pin-up walls are redwood. So not only do you have to pin your work to an endangered tree, but you have to do it with a staple gun. You need these giant pliers just to wrest your work from the redwood wall. Brilliant."

As I was walking through Faculty Glade on my way to my photography decal, a hawk - I think it was a red-tail - with a struggling squirrel in its talons swooped by less than 20 feet from me, hounded by a flock of squawking ravens. It landed on a branch of a tree near Stephens Hall, dropped the squirrel, and flew away, ravens in hot pursuit. When I walked by the squirrel, it was dead. What a surreal experience.

Photography was interesting. Our instructor talked about the class and gave a quick tutorial on shutter speed and aperture, which I'll read about in more detail in The Camera, the required text for the class. Those of us who brought work showed it off. Over the next week, I need to buy some black and white film, take a couple of rolls of pictures, develop them as 4x5 pictures, and make a couple of favorites into 8x10's. For the first couple of weeks, I'll probably get 2XP film, a black-and-white film that can be developed like color film. After that, I'm going to try to get into developing my film myself.