La Lune - Sons and Daughters

A very good day all round today. I'm not normally in work on a Tuesday morning as I do a couple of twighlight classes so have the morning off to make up the time. Myself and a colleague had a meeting with Edinburgh Council first thing today though. The meeting went well and afterwards we met a colleague, who had a group of students doing architectural studies in the old town, for a coffee.

We opted to go to the National Gallery for out coffee and I decided to enquire about the print room while I was there. I'd been told about it yesterday and recommended that it was well worth having a look at the Goya prints and etchings as a starting point. As luck would have it they were able to let us in to see them at 11 so we only had half an hour to kill drinking our coffee. In the half hour we had in there we managed to go through three of the nine folio cases of Goya work that was there. It was a selection of original prints he did between 1810 and 1816 which we were free to browse at our leisure. The morning was fantastic and I'll definitely be going back as often as possible to see as much as I can.

I was a bit jealous though. I had to be in at the college for 12.30 and the lunchtime lecture at 12.45 at the gallery was Professor Rolf Sachsse of Saar University of Fine Arts talking about the August Sander exhibition. I called Mackie at work who took a pile of the HND Photography students down to see it. Afterwards Professor Sachsse, who knew Sander personally gave Mackie and his students an impromptu tour of the Sander exhibition telling them about Sander's life, his personal connection to him and explaining who many of the people in the portraits were. Apparently he is also a master printer and was sharing his experiences printing from Sanders original glass negatives. Afterwards Mackie took him for coffee and had more of a chat about photography with him.

Another interesting fact about Professor Sachsse is that in the 80s he was approached by a certain Mr Thomas Knoll approached him for advice about a piece of software he was working on. Some of you may well be familiar with that bit of software...

Did I mention I was a bit jealous about missing that? Well I lied, I was a lot jealous. Still I had a great day regardless and will certainly be making more use of the gallery print room.

Here's today's song no youtube video I'm afraid but it's on their myspace.