A Student’s Point of View: The 3rd Floor of Gannett Hall
Hello everyone, this is Ashley Crichton writing again for RIT Photo! As promised, this post will feature the facilities and resources a photo student can find on the 3rd floor of Gannett Hall. I spend a lot of my time editing files and figuring out my new ideas when hanging out on the 3rd floor. The 3rd floor has the most social spaces where students can spend time with their friends between classes and discuss what they are doing for their upcoming assignments. Located on the 3rd floor is the main school equipment cage, twenty-five darkrooms, a computer lab, the Photojournalism center, the William Harris Gallery, and a professional quality output printing lab.
The 3rd floor equipment cage has all the camera bodies, lenses, tripods, and little camera accessories, basically everything except lights anyone could ever dream of. There are also laptops fully loaded with every imaginable software. Everything checked out from this cage can be used for up to 24 hours. You can borrow one camera body and have three lenses checked out at any given time. You can get all the basic equipment you could need for a shoot. The cage has all sorts of different brands of cameras so you can learn how to use anything you want without having to spend a ton of money buying new cameras. There are also all sorts of interesting, lesser known things you can check out. There are a couple infrared cameras that take weird pictures and all sorts of interesting film cameras. It’s also a lot of fun to hang out by the cage. The “cagers” do some fun things to keep everyone in the department entertained. Recently the big thing has been to make sports style brackets out of random objects, like pies or potatoes, and having everyone who checks out gear vote on what they want to win.
When I’m on the 3rd floor, I spend most of my time in the PJ lab. It’s called the PJ lab because a lot of photojournalism classes are held in there, but when it’s not in use, anyone can hang out in there. Although the name makes it sound somewhat exclusive to the PJ students, it’s just a great space to work in for any students who just want to focus. Having a class in the PJ lab was one of my favorite experiences in the RIT Photo program. Sitting around a table for class where you can see everyone’s faces made it feel more collaborative than any class I have been in before. It’s a great place to talk about ideas for upcoming shoots and show other student what you’ve been working on. The PJ lab is also used to hold club meetings for student chapter of NPPA and the occasional alumni speaker.
When I am in-between classes, I hang out in the airport lounge a lot. I’m not 100% sure why it’s called airport lounge but I’m pretty sure it’s because of the big wall of windows on one side that looks out over campus. The Airport Lounge is mostly just a social space. Some people can get work done there but I get distracted every time on of my friends walks in. You will always find people you know hanging out there at pretty much any time of the day or night. Airport lounge also serves as a good place to hold small events. A couple weeks ago there was an alumni panel hosted there, sometimes NPPA will convert it into a makeshift movie theater for screening of documents, and one of my favorite parts of the week, Magazine Monday, is held there as well.
The 3rd floor doesn’t just have places to socialize, there are also a lot of spaces that help students to get their assignments done as well. The facility I spend the most time using on 3rd floor is called Electronic Still Photo or ESP Lab. It’s a group of small computer rooms with four or five workstations in each room. I was told these rooms were originally the freshmen photography studios. It’s a great place to go and work if you need to collaborate with a group and don’t want to disturb a whole room of people with your conversation. It also has some imaging work stations that have dual monitors, which is useful for editing video (or watching Netflix while editing your photos). ESP also has the stop motion lab so you can create small animations! ESP is home to the most comfortable couch in Gannett and there is almost always a student taking a nap there.
Another facility that helps students create beautiful work are the School’s darkrooms. I haven’t spent that much time in a darkroom since I haven’t shot much film in college. However, I have a lot of friends who regularly spend time working in there. In these darkrooms, students can processes black and white film. Both color and black and white film can be printed in the F Series complex. Seeing the physical process behind how images used to be made is eye opening. The dark rooms are a place I want to become better acquainted with before I graduate. At one time, RIT Photo had 150 darkrooms but as digital has evolved, the need for more contemporary technology has caused big changes to these spaces. Each of the 25 darkrooms is equipped with a variable format color and B & W enlarger. There is an 8 foot stainless steel sink in each darkroom setup for one person. RIT does not have gang darkrooms common in other photo schools.
When we need to make prints bigger than what we can do ourselves, we can go to an amazing place called the Imaging Systems Lab, usually called ISL. They have a seemingly infinite different paper options to choose from, from plastic transparency paper to a Japanese paper that no one can pronounce the name of. They can also print much bigger than we could do ourselves on the printers in the computer labs. Last year I printed a seven foot long image and I have seen many other massive prints come out of there.
The 3rd floor also features the William Harris Gallery. It is the primary exhibition space for the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences. There is always work up in this gallery. Sometimes it is student work but sometimes outside work gets brought in. Right now there is an exhibition up called “Whose Streets? Our Streets!” that features work from 37 photojournalists who documented protest and activism in NYC 1980-2000. Artist panels are also often held in this gallery, it’s a great space to go to for inspiration. At the end of every year, the images that get selected for the Honors Show get hung in this gallery. This is my favorite exhibition of the year. I love getting to see all the work my classmates have produced hung in this beautiful gallery.
About the Author
Ashley Crichton is a 3rd year advertising photography student from California. You can read more about Ashley by following this link.