From Rob Bildner:

“As a serious amateur photographer, I long had a dream of bringing alums to the Yale campus for an educational photography workshop, similar to other workshops I have taken in other spectacular locations around the world, including Cuba and Yosemite. I was inspired to create this workshop by a photography collage I had seen years ago in my room at the Omni Hotel: It had gorgeous shots of the Yale campus with the lyrics to “Bright College Years” on the bottom. I knew that it would be fun for alumni photographers to learn from Yale ‘s resident photography experts to shoot Yale’s extraordinary campus. After several years of discussion with the AYA and Yale Photographer Mike Marsland, my aspiration was finally realized on April 24 when 14 alumni photographers from all over the world, including  72’er Alan Cohen, joined Mike Marsland, myself and other photographers from the Yale community for the “Yale, a Photographers’ Dream” workshop.

“We spent the next 3 ½ days and nights roaming around the Yale campus at all hours, camera bags and tripods slung over our shoulders. We took early dawn shots of Harkness Tower from the top of the architecture building and learned night photography at Beinecke plaza. We explored Yale’s nooks and crannies, including climbing several stories up the Woolsey organ to photograph some of its 12,000 pipes and we learned from the organ’s curator, Joe Dzeda, about his loving care for the organ, using turn-of-the-century tools and technology, to preserve its extraordinary sound over the decades. We even photographed the annual Holi Hindu festival as students threw colored paint over each other, just missing our cameras!  Inspiring our creativity, the curator of the Yale Art Gallery’s photography collection treated us to a private showing of some of the most famous prints in the collection, e.g. photos by Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and David Ottenstein ‘82, a photographer who has documented the vanishing rural landscape of Iowa in his “Vanishing Architectural Landscape of Iowa” project, showed us hundreds of his prints that have been collected by Beinecke’s western photography curator.

“The workshop was a big hit with the participants. We learned about technique, composition and digital processing, photographed beautiful and interesting spots on the campus and had a lot of fun, capped with a last evening of passing around the cups at Mory’s. AYA plans to make the workshop an annual event and we are considering taking the workshop on the road, to London, planning to transform ourselves into a “Yale Photography Network”. I hope you have a chance to enjoy some of our photographs bellow (or in a separate Photo Gallery posting), on the Yale website and in exhibits around the Yale campus. And special thanks to Mike Marsland, my partner in this project and one fantastic guy, as well as Kathy Edersheim, the head of Yale Educational Travel which sponsored the workshop.”

(CLICK on each image below to see the full photo.)