Today I bought a darkroom membership of 30 days to be used within 3 months. I printed for the first time in a year and a half, and boy am I out of practice! I worked with the same negative for about 3 1/2 hours. I'll be lucky if a good print comes out of today's batch. I remember when was able to print an image on fiber paper in about an hour when I was printing all of the time. That seemed slow to me then but today was ridiculous. It will probably take me a few days to get my groove back. It becomes much more intuitive the more you do it. I just wish that I didn't have to go through so much paper. It gets quite expensive if you don't quite know what you are doing.

I finally signed up for darkroom use because I am going to Photolucida's photo review in a few weeks and I want to add a few more images to my portfolio. I have been doing photography for so long without a proper critique and I need some professional feedback. I'm quite excited and nervous. I'm afraid of hearing something that I don't want to hear, but I'll never grow to my full potential if I continue hiding.

While I'm in Portland for Photolucida, I also get to hang out with my wonderfully talented and artistic friend Olivia too! We are going to a "dance party" together. What fun!