I have a lit midterm tomorrow that I'm putting off studying for. Spent another 3-4 frustrating hours in the photo lab today trying to print a couple of late assignments for my portraiture lighting class. I swear, printers are the most infuriating things in the world... I spent about 5 hours last Thursday working on the same damn prints... spent nearly $30 on 6 different kinds of photo paper, mat boards, photo mount, and printing fees, I made 16 or 17 prints, and they all turned out horrible. Even the lab tech guy seemed perplexed. Today, I brought a pack of really good quality 11x17 matte photo paper which looked great... but the person who had used the printer last left 3 pictures in the queue so 3 of my top quality sheets (which cost about $1.50 each) were wasted on projects that weren't even mine, and the lab tech couldn't figure out how to delete items in the queue. UGH. Kind of reminds me of this comic...
(I love The Oatmeal. If you haven't heard of this guy... he's freakin hilarious.)
In other news, the last few days have been kind of an emotional roller coaster... a few friends and I went to a rave Saturday night which was a lot of fun (though it took forever and a half to find the damn place), but on the way home after dropping us all off, one of my best friends almost died in an accident after swerving to avoid hitting a cat on a wet road and flipping his car. Amazingly, he came out of it with only a few scratches and bruises... his car was totaled, but at least he came out of it alright. It's crazy to think about how fragile life is... I'm just glad he's ok.
I also think I may have fried my camera... :/ I bought a Sunpak off-camera flash on Ebay and it arrived today. I did a lot of research beforehand to make sure that it was what I needed--I checked to see if the contact points were right, and I looked up the voltage to make sure that my Canon Rebel could handle it without a safe sync. Everything seemed to be right, so I excitedly took it out of the box and tried it on my camera... and after a few pictures, the shutter button and the ISO button refused to work. It slowly started to regain some of its functions (it will now take pictures, but only on manual focus for some reason), but I'm worried I may have caused permanent damage. Two websites I saw previous to buying the flash said that the voltage of this particular model was safe for a Canon Rebel, but after researching further today after the scare, I found some forums saying that Rebels couldn't take more than 6 volts, and my flash is 100 volts. Stupid forums and their misleading/conflicting information! Gahhh I'm scared! I'm going to go to my photo teacher on Wednesday and bring my camera and the flash to see what he has to say about it.
I also bought a Diana F+ on Ebay (new condition, but sold for about half the price of a new Diana from the maker's website--yay Ebay!) and that's a much happier story. This camera is seriously the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life. It's all plastic and it only weighs a few ounces--it feels like a toy, but I read the manual and played around with it a bit today and it's capable of some pretty cool stuff. I'm most excited about its pinhole setting and its multiple exposure capabilities. I find this whole lo-fi fad very interesting--in this day and age, you can make anything look exactly how you want it to look in photoshop, but this movement strives to shift away from our obsession with the ideal and find the beauty in imperfection and "happy accidents." I find that in my own photography I tend to do too much posing and too much post production. Perhaps this camera will inspire me to take more risks and be a little more spontaneous in my work. In any case, I can't wait to get ahold of some 120 film and start shooting!! :)
Hokay well I think I've put off studying for long enough... I've got a lot to read for that test tomorrow so I'd better get cracking.
