Doing Something Well is Hard, But Doing It is Not.

Today was the first day I forgot about my vocabulary quiz in class. I arrived anxious to do the homework that I had left off, and finished it as the teacher asked for it. When she began handing out the papers to take the quiz, as was the norm for the layout of the lesson plan, I realized I had completely forgotten to study. I took one glance at the pages of Chinese phrases I was supposed to memorize, and realized I had so little hope that there was no point in even being worked up about it. To my surprise, (and perhaps to some luck) I found that I recalled the vast majority of the characters from the homework I had just done. While I normally score above 95, I was overjoyed at the 77 I received because of how above my own expectations I had gone. It was thrilling to find how well I recalled the characters as she said them aloud, and I felt a strange sense of pride in surprising myself. I’m somewhat glad I forgot about the quiz, despite my low score. It was so much fun.

Now, the thought of doing something well being hard, but doing it being easy, came to me yesterday. I joined the darkroom club at NTU, and the first workshop I participated in was taught entirely in Chinese; in addition to this, I have very little knowledge of photography and physical film development, even though my mother and sister are more than proficient in camerawork. I knew the basics, that ISO and shutter speed and something I still poorly understand called the f-stop have control over how much and in what way light enters the lens, and that affects the look of your picture. However, I have never developed film and have no experience with film cameras. My mom and I bought my film camera the night before the workshop, and she taught me how to load the film. My mom told me stories of her developing film, of trying different settings on the enlarger [which shines light through the negative film onto photo paper, which creates a positive colored image, to my understanding] and I began imagining myself experimenting with different chemicals to develop film differently, feeling fluent in film development and trusting my hands in the darkroom.

I went into the workshop yesterday understanding very little of what they were presenting, but extraordinarily excited to start. They taught us how to use a tool that pulls the film out of the roll in case you roll the tail of the film into the canister. I tried somewhere between 6 to 8 times before that little purplish plastic sprung out. Everyone else at my table got it in 2-3 tries, despite it being their first time trying as well. Even so, I didn’t feel bad at all about how long it took me to succeed; in the end, I was able to get the film out, and the little tail hung out of the canister the same as if anyone else had done it. I was also extremely confident in the idea that I would simply get better at it the more I did it. I certainly couldn’t pull the film out well, but I still pulled the film out.

Even now, I’m sure the first couple rolls of film I develop will take a long time to get right, and the photos I end up now with simply won’t look as good as the photos I’ll have at the end of the year. My experience with taking, developing and editing the photos will make me better as I go, and I expect myself to produce things well in the future. But producing things at all is not difficult, and if all it takes is practice, and doing it is simple, getting good at something is actually very easy.