Back to school

So its back to college time for me!

The summer has been a wonderful time to allow me the opportunity to reflect on where I've come from, and where I want to go.

It was surprising how quickly last year passed, so I've made some resolutions about what I want to try and achieve at college in the year to come.

I know what I've got lined up, work wise for college, namely the following classes:

• Advertising
• photo-journalism
• image editing 2 (read: more photoshop stuff)
• creative industries
• documentary photography
• exhibition
• fashion
• location stock
• social photography

and of course, another graded unit where I have to produce 10 images, to a brief I set myself.

Last year, I think I did pretty well. I met all the deadlines for my work and produced decent workbooks. But I didn't really experiment as much as I probably should have done, particularly playing around with medium and large format cameras. Now, in this digital age, you might wonder why that would be important. Surely everyone works in a paperless world now of digital workflow, where instead of knowing whether to process something as E6 or c41, you're thinking about working in dng or psd file formats. I suppose my concern is that when I go out there into the big wide world, my job option isn't necessarily going to be a case of walking into a bnk, getting a loan, buying all the kit I need and then waiting for everyone to come running to me with photos they want. Chances are, I'm going to start out on the assistant level and I'm thinking, that the more things I can tuck under my belt of having had experience in, the better. Put simply, I'm looking at this for ideas of skills I can still learn. If I were to fill that in now, my knowledge stands at "I can use Bowens lights, and 35mm film". Oh, and I can drive and have a car. Although I do probably fair better than most in the languages section (I knew a degree in languages would be beneficial!).

So I'm planning to play with as much kit as I possibly can. Including.... the extremely lovely Hassleblad H3D which I had a little play with earlier in the week. But that will be studio only. Out of studio, I want to try and experiment with medium and large format cameras and see what happens. I want to try more darkroom work, even though I didn't seem to gel very well with the darkroom last year. Basically, I don't want to leave college with the same ticks in the same boxes as every other graduate.

Being back at college is a bit nerve-wracking, to tell you the truth. Less about the workload - I know I can handle that, and I feel quite relaxed. More about the prospect of the future.

It's going to be a pretty long journey, to get to where I want to be, and these two years at college are only the tip of the iceberg. I know one day, when I'm finally a professional photographer, I'm going to be saying things like "oh god, I remember this one job I did that was disasterous....!". Because that always happens, in every career, there are always disasterous days, although in the more successful careers, those tend to be a little more hazy as you'll have hopefully learned from the experience and not let it happen again.

I'm going to be skint. I need to get very used to that. Even more so than I am now. I'm going to have more outgoings and I'm going to watch my income go out on the necessities before I get anything (if anything) left to play with/spend on pretty shoes. On the plus side, having quit smoking ages ago, and now no longer having to work out how much goes on the cigarettes, makes things a lot easier financially.

I'll probably have to move south. I don't want to live in London, I think I'd rather commute. I commute already - an hour into college, an hour back. I don't mind it, it's good time I get to myself, when I can think about work, or more probably read a book, fall asleep, or play my DS Lite to relax. So ideally, I'd rather live outside London and get up at some godforsaken hour, than actually live inside London. What can I say? I like hearing the sound of birds waking up when I've just had a shower, and you don't get that in cities.

Admittedly, I'm a bit impatient, and would rather skip to the end to get the long, illustrious career, but that's just me. My worst fear is losing everything; having no place to live, not being able to afford to pay bills. However, I hope I'll recognise what's going on before I get to that stage and make necessary arrangements to prevent that from happening. There's a difference between being a struggling artist, and a stupid one.

In a way, I sort of feel like I'm wandering around the edge of a swimming pool. I feel a bit self-concious; I'm waddling around; I'm nervous of the temperature and the depth, and right now I'm aware the pool is already pretty full and I'm going to have to work hard to find a spot to swim in (or drown). I'm thinking about how I'm going to get in - do I sit by the side and slide in slowly, do I use the steps, do I dive in, do I use the high dive board and do a triple sommersault....

Anyway. Hopefully, over the next 7 months (!) I'm going to try and do as much as possible to make sure that I at least get into the pool and don't make too much of an idiot of myself in public.