The Polytechnic Photography Club meets every other Friday, giving challenges to it's members and organizing outings for the group. The group is focused on learning from one another and has some of their photos featured in the Polytechnic Library every year.
The club forces students to get out of their bubble. For unmanned sophomore aerial systems major Jeremy Taylor, he has noticed his photos have changed quite a bit since joining the club. He has grown an interest in concert shooting from his time traveling and photographing things he didn't know he would like.
Joey Lachiw, who is a junior studying graphic information technology, on the other hand shoots on film, which requires careful thought to be put into each photo.
Transcript:
Jeremy Taylor: The Poly Photo Club is a small group of anywhere from new photographers to advance and then some professional or people who are going to make that transition. We grow and teach each other. Like I said, but we also, work on our skills as this as a whole and socialize with each other while we're going out and taking photos.
Joey Lachiw: So we do have events. We try and do an event and an outing every month. Just actually this last weekend we went to a car show down in Mesa.
Jeremy Taylor: Here are some photos that we took over here. This one, this Cadillac was also taken in the same town of the Cadillac Fleetwood. This reminds me of cars from Route 66. We have one of my photos that we took last year from an outing at the beginning of the year when we were trying out astrophotography and night shooting. That was the first time I actually tried astrophotography and night shooting. And one of my photos made it into this submission to get printed up.
Joey Lachiw: Everyone will submit photos and then we'll go through we'll vote on what pictures we want to be in the showcase.
So everyone basically submits three or four and from there we pick out one or two depending on how many prints we have available.
So this is one of my photos right there with Chicago. I was just walking around with — my family's originally from the Illinois area, so every once and awhile I'll visit Chicago. Then I was just walking around, it was basically twilight where it was not dark but not particularly light, and I decided to try taking that picture.
And so there's that one where I was in Colorado with some friends and it was a mountain road and it was raining so I just stuck my camera out the window and we parked on the side of the road and took the picture and ended up being a really, really nice photo. Just really moody and really captured a lot of emotion in it.
Jeremy Taylor: Joining the photo club, you don't have to be a pro or an amateur or somebody or some random person with a camera. Some of the photos that some of the students take are with their phone. You don't have to have an expensive camera you don't have to have some cheap camera that you got off line or whatever. It's just what can you envision and then how can you bring your vision back to life.
Reach the reporter at zvanarsd@asu.edu or follow @ZachVanArs on Twitter.
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Zach Van Arsdale was the head of the multimedia department from August 2020 to May 2022, shaping design and multimedia storytelling at The State Press in addition to designing article experiences, illustrations and taking photographs. He has previously worked for The Howard Center of Investigative Journalism and on the Carnegie-Knight News21 project: "Unmasking America."
