A Student’s Point of View: the Gannett Hall Second Floor
Hello everyone, this is Ashley Crichton writing again for RIT Photo!
This post will showcase the second floor of Gannett Hall. A big part of the second floor are faculty offices and the School’s main office. I love being able to simply walk into offices of so many talented and interesting professors.
The second floor is also where the photo sciences department. Their labs are places most BFA students do not spend a lot of time except for PT (formerly M & P). There are also display cases where classes can share student assignments that change frequently and faculty offices.
However, since I love the scientific side of photography, I have taken a couple photo sciences classes in labs located on the second floor. Writing this post was a great learning experience for me. I got to go into all these really cool labs I never knew existed. I had no idea how many amazing things were happening on the second floor and I’m really excited to share what I learned!
The room I personally have spent the most time in is the Andrew Davidhazy Photographic Instrumentation Lab. This semester I have been taking High Speed Photography and it meets in this lab. I call room the High Speed Lab. I’m amazed by the number of things we are allowed to do in this classroom. We are always shooting ping pong balls across the room or smashing fragile objects. We even do a ballistics assignment photography in this classroom and RIT Public Safety fires a 22 caliber rifle into an Monroe County Sheriff approved bullet trap. This class is everything I love to do. We also build Arduino circuits and then program them so we can precisely capture water drops or for use on any number of other high speed events. It is one of my favorite classes that I am taking this semester and it has been a great introduction to the fun things that you can do in photo science.
Another lab I have been able to work in is the Ron Francis Lab. All RIT Photo students are required to take Photographic Technology (PT) I & II with Nanette Salvaggio. That class is held in this lab. I learned the Francis Lab was originally an analog laboratory and supported film emulsion studies. The PT course evolved from the old M&P that many students called Misery and Pain which was an RIT insitution. In the Photo Tech class, we would do all sorts of different labs. We study how different lenses distort an image or figure out how the color temperature of a light changes over time. I came to RIT because it offered me opportunities to learn things like this and I loved Photo Tech class. I enjoyed it so much I was a student assistant in the class last year, which means I spent 2 years seeing the experiments in this lab.
My existing knowledge of the photo science labs on the second floor only included the PT and Davidhazy labs however one of my friends, Sam Kang is studying Biomedical Photographic Communications and is much more familiar with the second floor. He was kind enough to show me around the parts of the second floor I didn’t know about. The first lab he showed me was the Hi-Mag Lab. In this lab, students use a couple different kinds of microscopes to get the opportunity to see “the things unseen” as he put it. They are able to look at things using DSLR’s hooked up to the microscopes. His favorite things to photograph under the microscope are Crystals that he creates himself.
Crystal photomicrograph features Midol and was photographed in the High Magnification Photography class by Brittany Bateman
Another really interesting lab I got to learn about this while doing research for this post was the Ophthalmic Imaging Lab. It is a highly specialized laboratory that is fully equipped to teach both anterior and posterior segment photography. Basically that means that students learn to photograph the outside of the eye including the cornea and iris as well as the inside of the eye called the retina. There is very cool cameras including one laser imaging systems used to create detailed and topographical retinal images. There are no classes being taught in this lab this semester, but a lot of my friends have taken the Ophthalmic class. My friend Lily has a passion for opthalmic photography and loved being able to learn so much about it here at school.
External eye photograph was made by Jenny Kellogg (formerly Wilkins) as an assignment in the biomedical photo III class.
One of the other classrooms I had never been in before is the Imaging Technology Lab. This is where the classes for the Imaging Systems Minor meet, as well as a few other imaging science classes. The minor consists of three required courses, all of which meet in this classroom. Right now, the current class is working on personal self directed projects and they mostly meet to get feedback on their projects and review what all the other students have been working on.
There are a few non photo sciences classrooms on the second floor too. One of the other classes that I was my 4D design class in the William Harris Lab. It’s another computer lab but more geared towards producing moving images and multimedia pieces. I really enjoyed working in this lab during my class. It’s nice to be in a smaller classroom computer lab. The Kodak Labs (located on the fourth floor) are great but when there are only a few people in your class, it can make the class feel impersonal. In William Harris, you are close enough that you feel more personally connected to the professor but it’s still big enough to do demo different video techniques.
Large-Format Darkroom is also located on the second floor and supports production of large scale silver halide prints, printing demonstrations, and the historic processes class.
One of the reasons I love RIT is that I am able to bring some of my passions for math and science into my photography. To me, the second floor is a treasure trove of exciting things I have yet to encounter. I love to talk to photo science students about what they are working on and this post was just an excuse to poke around asking questions. I hope you have enjoyed learning about the cool things we do at RIT Photo.
About the Ashley
Ashley Crichton is a 3rd year advertising photography student from California. You can read more about Ashley by following this link.