Picture perfect

The longest days of the week for me are Mondays and Wednesdays, with a full day of classes from 12:20 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The last three hours of these two tiring days of the week thankfully fly by, as they are spent in a photography darkroom that contains a broken clock.
There's something about not being able to tell the time that makes it disappear, an ironic tidbit considering that all we do in a darkroom is count the minutes each piece of photographic paper is in a chemical solution. Nevertheless, if my last three-hour class of the day were anything but an art class, my Mondays and Wednesdays would be nearly unbearable (brain-wise).
I am in love with my photography class. Its focus is black and white film photography, for which I take pictures with my dad's old 35mm camera. It's always a welcome surprise to look at my negatives minutes before class, and see that they all respectively contain an image worth magnifying. When using a camera as old as mine, it's always a "fingers crossed" moment to unroll that twisted circle of developed film and peek with one eye at the clear-ish mystery pictures.
Once I get into my classroom, cut my negatives into rows of five and put them in my floppy negative sleeve, the fun begins. Creating a contact sheet is sometimes more exciting than creating a print of a lone image. There's something about seeing rows of tiny, crystal clear black and white images appear one by one before your eyes when the paper onto which they were flashed is placed in a developing solution that makes you feel old and wise. Even though I'm a mere 21 years old, doing photography the "old-fashioned way" is exhilarating and calming, two traits that can make time pass in an unnatural way.
Lately, with two jobs, four classes, The Vista and USD Radio, as well as basic responsibilities like eating, talking and sleeping, my days can become quite overwhelming. Taking a class like my photography class is what I consider a therapeutic, meditative three hours to myself. It aids me in honing my time management skills, as creating a print requires specific amounts of sitting-time per each solution in which the print is placed. Two minutes to develop the image, 30 seconds to stop the developer, four minutes in the fixer to make the image a permanent part of the photographic paper and 10 minutes in the wash to remove all chemical residue and ensure a long life for my precious print.
The above process takes practice and patience, two key words when you think about what it takes to live your life to its fullest. Creating a print is, dare I say very, much like nurturing a life. You want it to be as beautiful, perfect and free of flaws as possible, as well as thought provoking, interesting and original. Though it may be a little stressful and headache-inducing, it's always nice to take my print out into the light for the first time and see what I have made, and feel good about it.