Fruggums

Since most (alright, all) of my friends have absolutely nothing to do with the arts it seems weird to them to study photography full time for four years. I mean, after all, anyone can take good pictures (right?)

Do I have exams? Do I have textbooks? Hell, what do you do all day?

Finger-paint.

But anyway, since I'm so sick of being asked what why and how I thought I'd outline a semester of work and then create an URL to this page and just slap it onto whoever asks next. And maybe it'd help anyone who plans on studying photography in the future.

This is the first year, so it's all about 'foundation' and basics. 

1. Photography Workshop

This Monday-morning 9AM class goes on till 3PM in the afternoon.

The first 3 hours are spent Darkrooming. In the first semester, it was B&W and the second, color. When working with film and light-sensitive paper, it can take up to an hour and a half to make a perfect print. I don't want to explain the entire process in the darkroom, just know that it does, it's a lot of work and takes a lot of skill to get it done right. Just imagine making a photograph without any digital intervention and you have enough of an idea on how complex it must be. 

The next three hours are spent in critique. 

The bulk of this class is spent outside the classroom or the darkroom. It's coming up with a project and executing it. Working on a new segment of it every week. It requires a lot of thinking and a lot of time. Especially since I had to travel far and wide to do my project (sometimes three hours each way). So just creating work for this class takes up a good few days of the week (and if it doesn't turn out right it has to be done all over again). And then printing it before critique. I usually bring in ten prints, and those can't be made in the three hours before class.

Here's some first semester work :

And some second semester work - the last two (see the full series here).

This was the second Monday course I had from 6PM - 9PM. 

This course was divided into six (I think?) parts. Each part covered a different topic. Examples were career prospect introductions and industry standards, video, photographs as art objects etc.

I ended up creating a lot of fun stuff in this course.

In Video :

Drumbone from Azhar Chougle on Vimeo.

And working with text (see the full series here) :

I put in more than the required effort for this class so ended up spending quite a bit of free time working on javascripts/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js?1251442053" type="text/javascript"> next week's project.

I really liked this course even though it has the word 'history' in it. It was a pretty thorough two-semester long introduction to how photography got going and how it's evolved into current-day what-it-is. We got to see a lot of amazing work this class, that was education in itself. And on a field trip we got to see real photographs from the 1840s.

There was a textbook. So there was studying and exams. Two exams (mid-term and final) along with a few papers and a creative project. So it was quite a bit of work but fun work. A bit of mugging for the exam but after all it is history so it's excusable. 

Was my only class on Tuesday from Noon to 3.

Hah, this was all reading and writing. We read some particularly strange things such as Candide and Whitman and Rumi (I liked none) but the professor was an ecstatic jumpy fellow. And we looked at a bit of art and did a bit of thinking so it was all good.

His essays were really challenging so that was what made this course for me. Relating art and literature to current events and things like that. Pretty complex stuff. Especially that really long research paper at the end of it.

This class was basics of Photoshop. Being self-taught in most of it already I didn't learn much here, but I did pick up a few neat tricks and was forced to work in ways I wouldn't have normally. There were no tests or exams, instead weekly assignments, which for me, culminated in some (personally rewarding) and excellent work. Examples below. 

6. Intro Photo (first semester only) :

This was a course to make sure that we know everything that we should before going on to advanced things like studio. Explaining the basics of photography and dejumbling things like ASA and what film is made of and how the darkroom chemicals work.

This course also had an awesome professor who would bring in amazing cameras and show us how to use them. Like Mamiya's and Hassy's - even a view camera. So it was a lot to learn and there were only two tests which were fairly simple for me.