Early on I posted a piece in which I explained why I decided to get into nightlife photography. With a cynical attitude towards being a part of the photographic industry following University, nightlife photography has shed some optimism on my photographic future as it helped me develop a plan. I’ll be candid and profess up until a few weeks ago I wasn’t impressed with my third year at University. For some reason I have always been a person who doesn’t really worry about their future too much, which is why I have always studied subjects which interest me. If I had a genuine concern I imagine I would be studying some humdrum crap like management or banking which actually has potential for future employment. But because I have no intention of spending the next forty or fifty years of my life waking up at seven or eight in the morning, five days a week with a feeling of enmity towards my life because I have to go to work, I don’t. Many find my approach immature, I receive the ‘hopefully you’ll find a rich husband’ joke all the time, utterly hilarious. Yet I don’t care. I’m happy to fill my head with interesting knowledge and work as a bar tender for the rest of my life if need be, just like in the movies, that middle aged guy with Socratic wisdom working behind the bar, they always seem happy, except I’m less of an advice giver and more of a conversationalist. So the reason I wasn’t too enthusiastic about my third and final year was because I wasn’t actually learning anything new and interesting. Instead I felt like I was constantly being asked where my future was headed, to which I would give an idealistic response and listened to practitioners talk about how they broke into the industry. And because week by week I considered the idea of me becoming ‘a photographer’ less and less feasible, I kind of didn’t care. On a more cheerful note though I’ve changed my mind and I think I get the point now. Third year is about building some structure in your life and taking some serious consideration. I felt completely mystified three or four weeks ago but now I feel slightly enlightened and it actually is because of the third year program. The idea is that I try get into nightlife photography when I leave University, it’s fun, reasonably achievable and a short term plan. In the further future I will hopefully be involved in journalism, but I still need to do a lot of work before that happens. Additionally I have come to the acceptance that I’m not much of a technology person. I don’t particularly like computers and I don’t care about the latest cameras and equipment. I tried to care in my first year, tried to learn about what cameras were being released and stuff about them but I found it distinctly boring. Throughout my first and second year I thought this was a bit of an issue, but I don’t anymore. My interest lies within the content of imagery and the story it is telling, regardless of whether it was taken with a Canon 5D Mark II or a disposable camera. So in a weird way, although I thought I wasn’t really learning anything this year, I was wrong. Over the last couple of months I have learnt about what I want, what I like and have considered this with plausible means of being a part of something that interests me in the future rather than worrying about producing work for the sheer fact that it’s listed on an assignment sheet. So I have produced a project on nightlife photography and it was fun. Hardly a reputable line to get into with a degree in photography I suppose, but I am hoping it will lead to bigger things and fund my survival until I get to do what I want to do.