Monday, October 1, 2012

having fun in the photography department

We're officially in the third week of school at NSCAD--but having spent three years at NBCCD (which starts the school year for non-FVA students on the Tuesday after Labour Day), it doesn't feel like three weeks.

Monday: I spent the afternoon walking around NSCAD, exploring and taking photos for my Beyond the Frame project, which is about my experience at NSCAD thus far.

That evening, I went to the Imaginus poster sale at St. Mary's University and bought three posters: Carmen by Mark Spain, Guns and Roses by Shepard Fairey and a Warhol quote poster, "Art is what you can get away with."

Tuesday: Because I'd booked the lighting studio for nine, I was up bright and early that morning. I did the shoot, making a handful of mistakes in the process (I corrected them).

Class that afternoon was a working class, which was great because I needed to process that roll that I'd shot a couple hours prior.

The day before, my new computer arrived--but neither my parents nor I knew where it was (the location given in the tracking info was rather cryptic). I didn't even know that it had arrived until Tom emailed me on Tuesday. A bunch of stressed-out emails ensued, and I planned to call UPS on Wednesday.

Wednesday: This week, we designed and printed book covers on a letterpress. We'll bind the books using perfect binding. My covers (we had to print three) have a treble clef followed by the word "music" with each letter a different font, with a silhouette of a violin from the side and lying on it's back below the word. All this is printed in dark blue ink. Here's a video about letterpress.


Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.

During lunch, the NSCAD Dance and Movement Club had their first meeting, which I attended. We discussed what kinds of dance we wanted to do, and we'll be inviting local dance instructors to teach at NSCAD--which means FREE DANCE CLASSES!!! You can't beat that--especially if you're a student who's living on a shoestring budget.

When I checked my email that afternoon, I found out that the computer had arrived at the residence mail room. I immediately emailed my parents, and then called a cab to NSCAD and went to the mail room. The parcel had already been picked up by my RA, Julia, so I went up to her room, where I opened it. Hello, new computer! It turns out that the computer had been sent to the employee mail room, which explained the mysterious location in the tracking info. I emailed my parents again, telling them the good news. End of stress. I plan to migrate my stuff--almost five years' worth of it--next weekend. I'm going to lose the ability to work with one or two programs, specifically Quark Xpress, but I'm thinking of getting Adobe InDesign (Quark's competitor, which is currently the industry standard) at some point. The fact that Adobe is very helpful when you have a question about one or other of their products doesn't hurt, either (Quark is known for being extremely difficult to deal with).

That evening, I reshot the Intro Photo assignment again. Thankfully, this was the final reshoot.

Thursday: This week, class was moved to the Academy Building, which is a stone's throw from the Granville campus, because NSCAD's board of governors was meeting in the classroom where I usually have Photography Beyond the Frame. We spent much of the class finishing the critique (mine was a good one, in case you're wondering), and also discussed the current project, which we'd started a week prior (the one where I'm taking photos that document my NSCAD experience).

I spent the evening in the darkroom, along with four of my classmates: we all needed to bang out five prints for the critique on Friday afternoon.

Friday: The critique went fairly well for me. I still needed to reprint my five prints because they didn't have as good a range of values as they should have (B&W photos--both film and digital--should have a full range of values: from pure white to pure black).

Saturday: I got my Intro Photo homework done that afternoon. The current assignment is to shoot three rolls of thirty-six-exposure film or the equivalent in another kind of film (e.g., nine rolls of twelve-exposure 120 film). I shot the first roll that afternoon. We were to work briskly, but carefully--and no looking through the viewfinder! I had the first roll done in about fifteen minutes, which is amazing, considering that it can take me forever to finish off a roll.

I spent the rest of the day getting little things around my room done and reading the Framework for Sustainability (the link goes to the PDF download), which is the report that the board of governors submitted to the NS government--and which SUNSCAD opposes (for good reason: there's got to be a better way of saving money and bringing NSCAD back into the black than slowly killing the university).

Sunday: I spent yesterday working on my Beyond the Frame project and slaving over a letter to the Nova Scotia premier and minister of labour and advanced education, telling them what I, as a NSCAD student, think about some of the parts of the Framework. I'm going to tweak the letter a bit more before I send it.

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