Final Reflection

I am back at Bowling Green now, and I returned my backpack to the Outdoor Activities office. I really did not want to give up this last little bit of my trip, but it's finally hit me - it's over. I decided to take this time to reflect on all the happy memories and growth that I was lucky enough to experience on this amazing study abroad.

I started this trip with very little artistic experience, but I definitely feel an increase in my technical knowledge about photography. I am by no means professional still, but I understand how to balance shutter speed and iso to capture dark images, moving images, and still images. I have changed aperture and manually focused my lens to capture some of the best photos I have ever taken. I can flip through my photographs from the first day to the last and note the disappearing ratio of blurry, bad photos to ones I will keep forever. It is because of this vast improvement that I think photography was my favorite art medium on this trip. I now know my way around a camera, and it became the best way to share my experiences with everyone back home. Photographs were also least invasive to the environment but the best memorialization.

I also had a lot of fun with the eco art we participated in. Tying my flax sculpture together made me feel like I was a true adventurer. Indiana Jones vibes aside, it also tied the philosophy of living sustainability to respecting the landscape. Unlike most other human actions, we were not permanently changing the landscape for our benefit. We were instead carefully choosing the resources that were available and using that to artistically express ourselves. Working outside made it even more fun. I noticed myself paying a lot more attention to my surroundings and thinking of them differently - instead of picking up a funky looking rock as a souvenir, I was trying to fit multiple rocks together in a stable bridge and putting a river perfectly in the background. Because I was trying to stack shapes that were not uniform, I had to experiment a lot and eventually accept that the vision in my head just might not work out. I was a lot more lenient about how I viewed my work when it was from nature, because I knew nature was not always perfectly symmetrical or even. I think that more accepting view is something worth taking from this class and can be applied to a lot more than just how I stack rocks.

This was actually a life-changing trip. I learned how to view myself as part of nature, instead of apart from the environment. I pay more attention to my surroundings and offer a little more appreciation. And, of course, I will always have the desire to return to New Zealand.