A Roll a Day

September 1, and school has started again. It's the second term of the school year, and if today's opening ceremony was any indication, the students are wiped out from their 45 days off. The principal remarked more than once about how sleepy the assembled mass of students looked. If they're anything like I was, they spent last night doing all the homework they put off until the last minute.

There are no English classes today (check that: at my morning school - afternoon school might surprise me with two), so I have some time to prepare for tomorrow's six classes in a row! Since a school day consists of only six classes (for a total of 4.5 hours in the front of the classroom), it is going to be busy. And since it's hot, it's going to be sweaty. And I'm pretty sure I'm the only teacher in the school who gets scheduled for a full day of classes (even elementary teachers don't spend all day teaching - there are specialist teachers that take over for math, science, and phys. ed.).

That gripe out of the way, today is also the start of my new project - A Roll a Day. For the next four months, I'm going to do my very best at taking a roll of photographs a day. 36 exposures per day (day being loosely defined as "a period of time between waking up and going to sleep that includes enough light for decent photographic exposure"). By combining this with the resumption of school, I figure there should be plenty to capture.

A sub-goal of this is to get people used to - in fact, bored with - me carrying a camera everywhere. A lot of people here shy away from cameras with lenses; they're just not used to them unless photos are being taken during formal events, which means they have plenty of time to primp and prepare. But on a normal day, people feel unprepared to have their image captured, and so they hide or put on a photo front (if you smile or pose at cameras, you are putting on a front). I want to get past that, to get the photos of people as they are, not as they want to be seen.

Now, off to prep for tomorrow.