If You Must Know

Okay, fine, if you really must know, I will give you an update of the Brooks experience.

For starters, this is the first night in four weeks that I have had the opportunity to do something other than come home and sleep. Normally I am in the studio nine to twelve hours a day. This session I also have agreed to be a Teaching Assistant to my favorite professor, who keeps me busy with grading on average three hours a night after a nine to twelve hour day in the studio. I don't watch television, I don't sit in front of my computer, I don't chat with friends on the phone. I eat, sleep, dream, and live every single moment of every day, seven days a week, some form of the photographic experience. I average four hours of sleep a night, average, meaning that if I sleep six hours one night, I sleep two the next.

This session is the right of passage. This is the infamous session that everyone talks about from Photo 101. I knew that this was coming before I even came to Brooks.

The session is Lighting Studio and it focuses on table top product photography. The main project of the session is called Black Glass. When I came to my open house in October of 2005 the students who were our guides mentioned it to each other and nodded with a joined camaraderie garnered not from sharing classes or group assignments, but from having survived Black Glass. It is revered. It has a stigma about it that no other single assignment in the Brooks curriculum has. It took my group fifty four hours. 54. We did it in six days of constant studio attendance.

I lost a friend. I gained the respect of the majority of my classmates. I brought my group together and forged our way through the project. They chose to proclaim me the leader and would have easily followed me into battle had I lead them. It was a turning point for two of my three teammates. The other is no longer in the fold. He has been cast aside as an irresponsible, unreliable manipulator. It is a permanent burnt bridge as far as I am concerned. This one assignment brings to the forefront all of the best and worst qualities of the people that you choose to have in your team. The only choice is who you want to work with, and that was our only mistake.

Even with my tireless teammates (those who chose to show up) and my keen awareness of perfection, presentation, and the extra mile, we still can only, at best, receive a B+ on the assignment. But it was hard earned and thoroughly bled for. We cannot expect more of ourselves than we provide with every ounce of our bright blood on the table. The table of Black Glass.