One minute | Dong Sicheng

Four

It was a week into the project. I had printed some samples of my final images onto normal A4 paper, and had stuck them into my sketchbook, ready for analysing.

Analysing was one of my favourite parts of the sketchbook part of work. I was able to share everything that I loved and hated about the images. I could share all the flaws I could spot, even if it was as small as a dust particle being on the lens, just near the corner of the image. I could write sentences and sentences about how I could've done better, and what I would do next time. I was free to criticise and compliment myself, without being told to not be too hard on myself from my teachers.

From the corner of my eye, I saw someone pass me, which slightly startled me as I hadn't noticed anybody enter the room. I looked up to see a tall, skinny boy leave the classroom. He turned around, and I immediately recognised him as Xu Minghao.

Minghao was good at a lot of things. I assumed that he studied sports, due to him playing football during breaks some days, and on other days he would be sat a girl, eating together with her. I assumed that they were close friends, as they were always non-stop talking. I had also seen on his Instagram that he was in a basketball team, played the piano and was good at creative writing. He seemed to be a golden child.

He was also probably the most popular out of everybody in our class. His Instagram page for photography had 10k followers, and every time I saw him, he would be smiling and talking to people, but I never got to know what about. All I knew was that his friends were quite physical, slapping him or pushing him. But he never seemed to be in pain from it, so I didn't think much of it.

I shouldn't have thought about it in the first place. We are not friends.

On this day, he seemed to be talking to the same girl that he sat with at lunch. I could not see her face as she was faced away from me, but I could see Minghao smiling once again, but this time it looked slightly wider. 

I looked away from them and continued my work. I noticed that in one of my shots, the Deer's antler had a slight bit of motion blur, so I should have changed the shutter speed to a higher number. 

I hadn't seen Minghao's figure walk past me again, so I looked back up towards the door, and he was still stood there, still smiling, and still talking to the girl. She punched his arm, and he started to laugh. I could feel the familiar feeling of envy creep into me, so I shook my head and tried to put all of my focus into the analysis.

I told myself that it's good that I have nobody, because then I can dedicate my time to this project.

But I also couldn't stop myself from glancing at them every now and again.