Photography (with integrated foundation year)

Got a passion for photography, but not sure if you're ready for a degree? Well, our foundation course will give you a strong grounding to experience life through the camera lens to advance your studies to degree level.

For your foundation year, you will be learning alongside other creative students from our Art & Design programmes including Fine Art, Graphic Design and Illustration. You will be given the opportunity to learn skills from all of those disciplines whilst being able to focus on photography as your chosen pathway. This grounding will really enrich your skills and creative ideas ready for you to take them into your study on the degree programme.

You'll learn all the essential photography basics - how to use a variety of cameras, both digital and film, how to make creative images, work in a studio and on location, and how to print your photos to a high standard.

In addition, you'll explore historical and contemporary photographers and the creative arts more broadly to encourage you to develop your own style and flourish as a photographer ready for year one of the degree course.

**Your Career with a Photography Degree**

A degree in Photography can open up a fantastic range of career options. Freelance or in a permanent position, studio-based or on the move, the skills you learn will help you no matter what route you decide to take. Our former students have gone on to become assistant photographers, picture editors and researchers, forensic and medical photographers, gallery curators and more.

For many of our students, their career path begins even before graduation through commissions and success during their studies. In his third year, Harry Renton won Photo North Festival's Student Award in 2019 and graduate Joe Hardcastle was a winner of the Photography Chromatic Awards in 2019. Our photography students have regularly received the Institute of the Arts' Highest Achieving Student of the Year award, and Liam Collins won the first Young Cumbrian Artist of the Year in his second year. The shortlist of ten for this inaugural year was exclusively made up of our photography students. With this level of drive and focus on our programme you can be sure of creating critically-acclaimed photographs during this course.

Your foundation year will help you prepare for working independently as an artist and photographer, and get you ready for year one of the degree course.

**Year 1** - Your introduction to photography will see you exploring a variety of lens-based and other creative media through contemporary and traditional ways of working. So, you'll be experimenting and exploring photography using a variety of techniques and processes.

**Year 2** - You'll develop your photography and technical skills working with our state-of-the-art digital equipment and darkroom. We'll put you in control, but guide you to enhance your ideas and explore the avenues of expression.

**Year 3** - You'll continue to hone your practical skills and creative vision using traditional and cutting-edge processes with an emphasis on getting your work out there through book publication and exhibition. Employability, experience and industry skills run through this stage of your degree.

**Year 4** - Your focus will be on organising and creating work for your own exhibition. As part of this we teach you professional and entrepreneurial skills to give you not only skills within the field of photography, but the knowledge and confidence to set out on your chosen career.