The Beginning of the End.

Today was a sad day in my Roman life here. Today marked the last day of my pinhole photography class.
It just makes me sad because I'll never see my class mates and teacher (Bill) ever again. And I won't be able to run to the studio whenever I'm having a bad day, or to just escape the world, and take and develop these pictures that I can never perfectly plan out. It's impossibly amazing.
Sometimes, I think I've found my dark-side with this photography thing. Some of my pictures come out seriously freaky, while others come out absolutely beautiful, and I love it. Even though I've only been doing it for 5 short weeks, and I would NEVER call myself a photographer at this point because I'm just starting out, there is some sort of evolution through my photos. By looking at them, anyone could tell which pictures were my first and which ones were my last, and that's crazy to me. You can see improvement right before your eyes.
It's like, the way some of these pictures come out are completely different than what I mean to take the picture of, and in a way, it shows different things that I don't pick up by my eyes alone. It's like my camera sees things that I don't and now I can because all this stuff is opening my eyes to how amazing this place really is- and just in a structural and historical way, I'm not even counting the food side of Rome, or the party side, or the friendships I'm developing from this place.
It's crazy, the things that we don't even pick up on, but by learning how to actually use a camera or use one we made from a Pringles can, it's like the paper picks up on things that we tend to look over.

I hope that when I get home, I will be able to find some place to keep taking and developing photos. Because the last time I've felt like this about something was back in high school, with my music, and now, sadly, I cannot create that atmosphere and feelings anymore. These little pictures bring out an intensity, focus, and pure happiness that I haven't felt in a long time.

They may not look like much, but they mean a lot to me. The first two are self-portraits. It took me almost an hour to get the timing right so I would even appear on the photo paper... it was a lot of back and forth from the dark room to taking the actual picture... because it was so sunny out that day. 

The third picture is of the building across the street and the cars parked underneath it. For some reason, it came out in this color when I inverted from its negative using Photoshop. And the last is another self-portrait, taken by my friend Halley, and her pinhole camera. These are all pinhole photos. 

I also have a ton of film photographs, which came out awesome! I don't want to give away too many, because I'm saving one in particular for a gift, but I'll give you all a sneak-peek. 

And I know where I get this passion from. Thank you, Bop. I wish you were here to teach me and see me now.

Molte Benedizioni