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I cannot believe that nine weeks has passed. I really enjoy Photography class, and it seems like posting two blog posts every week has become my habit. It is sad to know that this is going to be my last post on this blog. The past nine weeks were really fun! Uploading photos every week made me realize what kind of photography that I am good at (shooting random still objects) and what I am not (mostly everything else haha). I also had a chance to work a lot with awesome tools that I have never utilized before such as Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom (because I shoot film and usually take photos straight out of my film scanner, unedited). Reading Rexer's The Critical Eye was also a great experience. I really like how the book divides each photography genre into separate corresponding chapter. Moreover, the book does not overwhelm me with hundreds of photos/photographers, but instead, featuring just a few incredible photos/photographers with clear discussion about them. An

Vivian Maier A few years ago, I was in search of a Rolleiflex camera and upon researching about this camera online, I came across an amazing photographer named Vivian Maier. She, with her Rolleiflex, has shot thousands of incredible photographs of the people and city of Chicago, sparking my love for street photography (and the camera also!). Yet, digging deeper into this photographer's background, I realized that, unlike her well-known photographs, her life was, in contrast, very private. In fact, her work almost never got to publicity, not until a realtor named John Maloof stumbled upon a box of Vivian's negatives at an auction house that he paid $400 for. He realized how good they were, and started posting them on Flickr. The pictures quickly got noticed by photographers around the world, but sadly, it was after Vivian's death. Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926. She worked as a nanny in New York, and later moved to Chicago in the 1950s.

These are some photos I took on my recent trip to Madison. To be honest, it was so difficult to select a good frame for a picture in a vast city where everywhere and everything could fit nicely and beautifully in a frame. And also, I was using a new film camera that I just got a few weeks before the trip, and the slow handling (I hadn't got used to the camera yet) really made me miss a few shots. Nevertheless, here they are...

In this chapter, Rexer discusses about street photography. He wrote: "Sometimes the photographer's agenda is broadly political, [...] committed to revealing unseen or ignored conditions and the people who experience them. Sometimes it is aesthetic, to capture the changing patterns of light, shadow, color, and form that define the ineffable atmosphere of the moments in the city." However, no matter what the purpose is, I find, for street photography, they all share one thing in common, which is candidness, which is what I find interesting in street photography. In fact, I believe street is probably the most candid kind of photography. It involves no studio lighting, no setup or anything, but instead is just a photographer capturing split moments in everyday life. That is also what makes street photography very free and available, thus to a certain extend, easy. But among the vast availability, only very few pictures (decisive moments capturing beautiful people's intera