RIT students document time spent in Dubrovnik

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RIT photography students and hospitality and

RIT's Student Ambassadors descend onto Dubrovnik for their 23rd trip to the "Big shot"

RIT’s annual “Big Shot” photography project will certainly live up to its name next month in the picturesque city of Dubrovnik, Croatia, along the Adriatic Sea. People from all over Europe and the United States will be converging on the walled city for the making of the nighttime photograph.

RIT’s student ambassadors for the project have already arrived in Dubrovnik. For the first time, a group of photography majors from the School of Photographic Arts and Sciences are spending the spring quarter there visually documenting the people, culture and historical architecture. In addition to an extensive photography course, the students are taking elective courses at RIT’s American College of Management and Technology. “I feel this study-abroad experience is an opportunity to explore myself and my surroundings, just in a different location than Rochester,” says Tyler Joyce, a third-year photojournalism student. “I have grown restless in the states, and I would like to learn something about another culture.” Students and alumni from RIT and ACMT, along with the Dubrovnik community, will be armed with flashlights and camera flash units after sundown on April 12.

The Big Shot, often described as a “painting with light” photograph, requires hundreds of volunteers. Strategically placed along the high fortress wall near Dubrovnik’s Pile Gate, the volunteers will bathe the parapets, turrets, stonebridge and moat with their light sources while RIT photographers shoot an extended exposure. “It’s like standing on the street in a discotheque because all the flashlights and camera flash units are waving all over,” says Bill DuBois, administrative chair of photographic arts in RIT’s School of Photographic Arts and Sciences and a Big Shot organizer. “It still amazes me how hundreds of people come together for an event that is over within minutes. The Big Shot is truly a community event and we are so excited to be sharing it this year with our RIT family at ACMT as well as with the people of Dubrovnik.”

This will be RIT’s 23rd Big Shot and only the second one to be photographed at an international location, following the event held at the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Sweden, in 2003. To learn more about the Big Shot project and details about the Dubrovnik event, a podcast, “Destination Croatia: A Preview of RIT’s 2007 ‘Big Shot,’” is available on the University News Website (see “Latest Podcasts”).