Blog Post 3: Mind if I Take Your Picture?

For my photography project, I decided to take a trip down to Fort Collins. I think Fort Collins, in a lot of ways, is a bit more visually interesting than Laramie, and I just needed to take a trip, you know?

Anyway, while I was there, I took a lot of pictures. Here are a few of them.

Photo One

The press box at City Park Field. The amateur summer team, the Fort Collins Foxes, and the CSU baseball team share the field.

Last summer, I had an internship with the Foxes, so I spent a lot of time at City Park Field there. It was a pretty fun internship; I got to know a lot of the players and some of the fans there, too. I worked up in the press box, pictured above. I got really familiar with that box, which couldn’t have got any hotter in the summer if it tried.

Some of the creative devices I used were the rule of thirds and color. The box is mostly in the right third of the picture and the green and gold pops against the white and black that makes up most of the picture.

It was nice getting a chance to go back to the park again. It felt a little awkward walking around, since there were some people around. I wondered a lot if they thought I was a creep or a drug dealer or something. They probably didn’t care.

Photo Two

The Wrecks opened for New Politics at the Ogden Theater in Denver, CO.

I’ve never been a big concert guy. I don’t know why. I love music, but concerts have never appealed to me. Now, my favorite band is The Wrecks. My best friend, Zach, his favorite band is New Politics, who were touring with The Wrecks and were stopping in Denver. He texted me like three days before the concert and asked if I wanted to go. It was a huge step outside my comfort zone. It was super loud, packed, someone spilled beer on my shoe, but it was an incredible experience.

The main creative devices I used were the rule of thirds and color. Maybe a bit of leading lines. The light from the spotlights all converges on the lead singer, who’s in the bottom right third of the picture. I think this would be a feature picture.

Photos Three and Four

A couple goes skiing in City Park in Fort Collins.

Bean Cycle Roasters in Old Town is a peaceful refuge from the wind and snow outside.

When I went to Fort Collins, it was pretty cold. It was practically a blizzard by the time I left, which was fun to drive back in. I got stuck behind a guy with a California license plate who’d probably never driven in snow before.

Anyway, I chose to focus on the weather for my juxtaposition, since it’s either the perfect time to go out and have fun, or stay inside and be warm. When I was walking around City Park, I saw this couple skiing around in circles. They were cool with me taking their picture, but I never caught their names.

Meanwhile, others were huddling around coffee mugs in the warm indoors. I went to Bean Cycle Roasters off College in Old Town. I got a chai tea. I forgot I didn’t like chai tea. There were a lot of people in there, people my age using the space to work on projects or whatever, people there to just hang out and stay somewhere warm.

In the first picture, I went mostly for the rule of thirds. In the second, I tried to get a different perspective. I took a lot of pictures from the main level before I went up to the second floor. I like it up there, since it gave me a different idea of everyone that was there.

***

This was a little challenging for me, personally. I’ve never been a fan of taking pictures of people. Landscapes and objects are better because you can position them exactly how you want and you have a lot bigger window to get your shot. With people, you might have this idea in your head and the best time to make that happen might come and go in an instant.

Blog Post 2: On-Campus Housing at UW

One of the most important aspects of choosing a new university, whether we think about it or not, is housing. What are the dorms like? How big are they? Will I have a roommate? Will my roommate be cool? What if they’re not?

All of these are questions that run through a soon-to-be college freshman’s head at some point. And with all the benefits that the University of Wyoming has for students, they’ve been lagging behind when it comes to housing benefits.

“You look at universities around our region, like Colorado State, the thing that people are looking for nowadays is more apartment-style or suite-style rooms,” says UW’s executive director of residence life and dining services Eric Webb.

Apartment- and suite-style rooms are a specific type of residence room with 2-4 people. Each of those people have their own room with a connected bathroom and sometimes a kitchen.

The University of Wyoming has two on-campus housing options: the Washakie halls and the UW apartments. And the Washakie halls could be getting an upgrade in the next few years.

Washakie Dining Center and McIntyre Hall. Credit: UW RLDS

“It’d be nice to have options.”

Let’s go back to our example of Colorado State. Strictly speaking about the residence halls, they have 12 options to offer to incoming students, with everything from your typical dorm room to a suite-style single with a private bathroom. Wyoming, by comparison, has just four.

“I think the big thing about the halls right now is that there aren’t very many options for incoming students,” said resident assistant Max Prevost. “You pretty much get a double or a single, with maybe a couple details that are different.”

That’s the big thing that the RLDS office is looking at. The world of university housing has been moving forward, and UW has been left behind.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve done anything with the halls,” said Corey Peacock, Assistant Director of Residence Education. “The last remodeling we did was in White Hall back in 2001. It doesn’t sound too long ago, but that’s 17 years now.”

In an effort to keep up with the times, UW Residence Life submitted a ten-year proposal to the board of trustees to potentially build new halls on-campus.

“We’d like to be able to snap our fingers and have everything work, but we can’t.”

One of the big obstacles that Residence Life has to overcome is the budget crisis.

“We got lucky, really,” said Webb. “We got our proposal in and approved right before the budget crisis really started to take full effect.”

The first step of the proposal was to close Hill and Crane Halls. Crane had been home to the English department the year before while Hoyt Hall was being remodeled. That step has been completed, but not without a couple unforeseen complications.

“We had the biggest freshman class we’ve ever had at UW this year,” said Peacock. “Being able to have those extra rooms in Hill would’ve eased a lot of the pressure in the halls.”

The second step of the plan was to tear down Hill, Crane, and the conjoined dining center, but the budget crisis put a brief pause in the plan.

It’s not the end of the world for the plan, just a little bump in the road.

Why do better dorms even matter?

One question people around campus might find themselves asking, especially during this crisis, is “Why does this matter? Why are we spending money on this?”

Residence halls are a major, but hidden, factor when prospective students are picking out their new university. The halls are often one of the first things future students see and the thing that they remember most. It sounds cheesy, but the residence halls are almost like the gatekeepers of the university.

The University of Hawaii-Manoa, for example, has a very open floor plan in their halls. It allows for the residents to feel a little bit more like they’re in Hawaii. Those working at the University of Wyoming don’t want the first impression on students and parents to be cramped, unaccommodating rooms.

The bottom line is that the university wants to increase enrollment, along with making living in the halls easier for residents.

“That’s really what we’re in the business of,” said Peacock. “Making sure that as many people as possible have the most enjoyable experience they can while at UW.”

Blog Post One: What Do I Want?

I’m honestly really excited to take this class. A lot of the things that we’re going to be going over and learning are skills that I’m going to need directly in the professional world, like photography and video and audio. Those are all skills that I haven’t really worked on or learned, and I really should get a handle on those. Being on the social media side of things, all of those skills are gonna be incredibly important. Everything from in-game graphics, posts, etc., hinge on one of those three things.

Not gonna lie, I’m very, very excited for the live tweet assignment. Not only is that literally what I want to do for a living, I also happen to spend way to much time on Twitter. When I first signed up for Twitter, I told myself that I wasn’t going to tweet too much and I wasn’t going to live tweet anything. 20,629 tweets and a whole lot of live tweeting later, I think it’s safe to say I’ve broken that promise.

In fact, I can tell you exactly what I’ll do for that assignment right now. It’ll be a Rockies game, one of the ones against the Padres or Nationals. Or maybe the one that Sunday against the Braves, since there’s a solid chance I’m gonna be at that game anyway. It’s Opening Weekend and they’re giving away a bobblehead; how can I not go?

Anyway, I’m really excited for everything this class is going to offer me. I think it’s one of the only classes I’ve taken in a while that has honest-to-god impact on what I want to do.

As for what I want to report on and talk about, I’m not entirely sure. I want to take a sports angle, maybe something with UW athletics? The MLB is going through a weird period right now where no free agents are getting signed, and there might be a strike once the current collective bargaining agreement is up. We’ll see where this whole thing takes us.