In the past two week, I was working on two tasks. One was to take photographs for billboards where Capture will put on lens-based artwork in the near future, the other was to contact Capture exhibiting artists for an equipment research.

Capture Photo Festival publishes a magazine annually reporting their works throughout the year, my task was to take photos for the billboards where Capture put works from both local and international artist on it, and this was completed by me individually. Hopefully, Capture will choose my photos and publish on the magazine. Besides the photographs for the billboard, I also take some informal photos of the surrounding to share with the artists, just to give them an idea of the environment where their work would be put on, since some of them are international artists and they are not able to come to Vancouver. Capture not only works on an exhibition program, they also have public art program and events program that aim to spark public dialogue about photography. The billboard project is part of their public art program. This year, they plan to put artworks on 6 billboard, two 2-sided boards and two single-sided boards along the Arbutus Greenway between Fir and Burrard Street and 5th and 6th Avenue. During that week (Sep 28th), I don’t need to report to the office. Taking the photographs only takes about an hour, I used the rest of the time to edit the photographs at home to fulfill the required learning-working hours. A problem I encountered during the shooting was that there was actually more than 6 billboards on the site. To avoid omission, I take photos of all the billboard in that part of the Arbutus Greenway. Before going out for the photographs, Kate (our supervisor) shared a few examples of billboard images with me and I did some research on billboard images additionally. Luckily it was sunny on the shooting day and I enjoyed the time.

The other thing I worked on in the past week (Oct 5th) was contacting Capture exhibiting artists for an equipment research. Fuji Film reached Capture about potential sponsorship on artists who use Fuji equipment. Billy and I were given a list of contact information and we need to send them emails asking what equipment they use. There were around 50 artists we need to contact, so we divided the list into two part, each of us will do half of the list. Before sending the email, we double checked the list and discussed with Kim, Kate, and Jaclyn on how we should phrase the email to avoid any mistake. One thing I noticed is that as part of the organization, we need to be very rigorous when communicating with our exhibiting artist in order to keep a good and productive relationship with them.

The tasks I completed so far was not too challenging, but it allows me to apply what I learn in class to work and allows me to observe and experience how such not-for-porfit organization works.