Week 2

Well here I am, week 2 of my placement well underway. This is a really good experience for all of us in this course I'm sure. Hard to believe that my college had never had a placement portion in the course before. It took our current coordinator about 5 years to get it into place. There are quite a few options for placements within Sudbury so it's not like any of us should have had any trouble getting a placement. 


I'm working at Creative Odyssey in Sudbury, Ontario. If you get a chance you should check out their website, they do some nice work and I'm learning a lot about different processes that we touched on in our courses but not in-depth (www.creativeodyssey.com). Unfortunately I can't post any of the jobs I've been working on because of a non-disclosure agreement I had to sign, but trust me it's fun stuff, and after all I did get into this career because I enjoy it and it is a lot of fun. I don't think that many people actually get to work at something they really enjoy, so if you do have a job that you love, count yourself very very lucky.


If you are stuck in a job that is not something you enjoy, or isn't creative, I highly recommend finding a hobby that allows you to be creative. Whether that means scrap-booking (which is very popular these days) or photography (another popular pastime), just find something that you think you’ll enjoy and go out there, be creative and have fun. I leave you with a piece I did for my Advanced Design Applications, this was for a film festival and I utilized the International Type Style of Josef Müller-Brockmann. It seems that converting it to a JPEG has dulled the colour a bit, but it still works. Enjoy :)

HDR

So we did some HDR photography in class the last couple weeks, they are pretty cool to do, but I'm guessing much easier if you actually have "bracketing" on  your camera, which I don't. So in order for me to do HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography I have to manually set my shutter speed to get the 3 - 7 different exposure levels. If you've never tried HDR you should it's really kinda cool, here's one of the photo's I took. FYI old, rusty, dirty things look really awesome in HDR.

Woohoo!

Well, well, well, well... It's almost done! My first semester of my 3rd year is almost done! I have a placement in a little over a weeks time :) I'm really looking forward to it, I think it will be a great experience. I've been doing freelance work but this will be in a studio :) Then only one semester left and I'll be among the ranks of the working class again :)

Dynamic photos

During the last project we did in photography class I came to the conclusion that even the most mundane of shots can be livened up with a little creative cropping. It is much more important to look at every photo that you are going to take with a creative eye, that way you can almost guarantee that you take care of your cropping as you shoot your subject. On the off chance that you don't get that perfect crop on camera, then of course it doesn't hurt to play around with the cropping tool in Photoshop (or whatever derivative of software you use to edit) and find that perfect crop. Don't be shy about it, you have unlimited undo's at your disposal. So get out there and practice some creative cropping :)

Food Food Fooooooood

Had to try my hand at some food photography for a class assignment. I've found a new photographic interest, I really enjoyed setting up and taking the shots for this project. Here's one of my favourites from the shoot. 

It Begins

So, 3rd day of my first week down and it's looking like it's going to be a very very busy semester. We've had Advanced Design Applications and Corporate Identity so far. They are worth a lot of credits so take up a lot of hours. Very interesting classes so far, although we haven't really done anything "hands-on" yet, it's been mostly lecture, we did have presentations today on logo analysis. I think everyone did very well considering we only had the evening to pick a logo to analyze and put our presentations together, I keep envisioning how fun this is going to be in the field... reminiscent of "Mad Men", a great show on advertising and design back in the 50's I highly recommend it.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/

First Day

Well that's it folks... first day of the last year of the rest of my life... Wow is that ever cryptic lol. What I mean to say is, my first day of my 3rd year of Graphic Design went very well. 3hrs of a 4hr class just flew by and we were let out early. It was great to see all my co-students (friends, acquaintances, peeps). This is definitely going to be an intense semester, 15 weeks of class condensed into 10 to make room for a one month placement. Because of this we have gone from what would have been 15 - 17hrs a week up to 23hrs a week. Very, very intense. Anyhoo, just wanted to try and keep this going on as much of a daily basis as I can. To end this post here's a picture of some wicked clouds over my neighbours house...