Prepping for School, part 2

For the first time in a while, I’m taking more than one class in a term. This ought to be interesting, because I tend to obsess over my classes. This term, I’ll have to split my angst. I’ve already mentioned fretting over Large Format; this particular manifestation of my anxiety post concerns Projects.

“Portfolio Projects” is its official name, and it is intended to provide “the opportunity to work on an extended photographic project of the individual’s choosing.” For many people in the Photo Program, it has a nebulous, no-really-what-am-I-going-to-have-to-doooo? quality to it. This response is partly because up to this point, all of the photo classes are technically oriented. Even though each class offers some sort of “project” as part of the coursework, the “project” still has something to do with the (technical) content of the class.

In Projects, the “project” is the content of the class. For people who came to WCC specifically to enhance their knowledge in a particular area of photography (such as portraiture), the class is relatively straightforward. They have their genre, and their preferred working methods, and now they have a chance to focus on their style and presentation.

The people who maybe are in college for the first time, and think photography might be something for them, but they aren’t sure, but they have to take this class to get the AS and maybe transfer to an art school but maybe they should just… they have a harder time figuring out even what kind of photography to do, let alone try to decide how to wrap it in a project.

While I’m not in college for the first time, I feel more akin to the second group. However, my issue will be not that I don’t know how to do a project, but that I have so many ideas and I don’t know quite how to narrow them down. Some I can’t do because of time, policies, or physical constraints. However, that still leaves a large list, some involving alternative processes, some involving film, some involving photographing people. Perhaps even some involving all of those.

None of my ideas have gelled past the “hmmm, I wonder” part, so I’m not going to go through them here. Yet. I think what I need to do is 1) go to class tomorrow(!), 2) organize my ideas better. Right now I have about 80 DayOne entries tagged “ideas” but they’re not arranged in any order other than by date.

Yay! It seems I’ve found a way to channel my anxiety. I think that having any sort of “prep” work, even self-imposed, is better than giving myself time to worry about something that I don’t yet have any idea about.