Wow! Where have I been? A thousand apologies. I can only sit here, type, and beg for your understanding and forgiveness (see groveling).
Honestly, I let myself get a bit too involved–and overwhelmed–with my two online web design courses through Lansing Community College. The work, building web sites using XHTML code only, took up an inordinate amount of my non-teaching time.
But this is just an excuse, and I am bored of myself already, so enough!
Only eighteen school days remain in the 2008-2009 year! Yikes! Some of you wonderful people will be making the trek over to the high school next fall, which makes me a bit sad. Not that I get to speak with you as much as in sixth grade, but just the knowledge that you are in the building is usually enough to make my day. No lie.
Speaking of you peoples, I have recently discovered that some of you have begun venturing into photography. Splendid! I have always regarded photography as a form of magic. People seem willing to expose their inner selves (on many levels) when a lens is targeted upon them. Objects that we take as mundane, or boring, or do not even notice because they are so every day, so trivial, become beautiful or downright spectacular in a photo.
It is art, is it not? What do you think about that idea? Some people claim that since a person uses a machine (a camera) to record an object which they themselves did not create in the first place, that this does not qualify as “art.”
I tend to disagree with this notion. I believe that a photographer can take an object, a barn full of “junk,” or dust on a radio dial, for example, and create an image with a unique emotional quality. I think that photographers use their individual perspectives and “see” a certain loveliness or tragedy or hilarity in the subject that they are photographing. Probably, they already know what the picture is before they even snap the shot.
I don’t know. But I am curious as to what you think.
By the by, since we are talking, I know of a couple of online editing sites that may be worthy of checking out if you are at all interested. They are: pixlr and splashup, both still free (Web 2.0). Then there are a couple pretty nice sites (also Web 2.0) which you can upload your photos (or take directly from flickr) and create videos, movies, with your own music or choose from their selection of tunes. These are stupeflix, and Animoto.
Could be fun!
