And so, dear readers, we have reached the end, or rather the beginning of the story, at least my story with Oakville. So it is only fair that the place that brought me to Oakville in the first place is the last sheet shared, that of Sheridan College.
And while my involvement with Sheridan starts with Oakville, Sheridan’s story begins in Brampton. In 1965, the Ontario government, under Premiere Bill Davis, signed into law an act to create a series of colleges across the province. These post-secondary institutions would provide a practical education for students. And in Brampton, Ontario, a condemned and closed High School became the first campus for Sheridan College. Sheridan touted itself as a college for the arts, specifically focusing on animation. Animation was not new but was a fast-growing sector within the film-maker community. With a faculty of thirty-two and a student population of 400, Sheridan offered up seventeen programs when the doors opened in 1967. And soon, it quickly expanded, running continuing education classes in community centres, high schools, and church basements. And it wasn’t only arts; computing classes started in 1969 using an IBM System/360, heavy equipment operation, and much more. But with demand growing and the old high school running out of space, construction had already started for a new campus in Oakville, located near the former settlement of Vernerville (Trafalgar & Upper Middle). While incomplete, the new Trafalgar Road Campus opened to students in 1970. The open-concept building boasted bright open studios for the animation students. More buildings were added through the decade as more programs moved away from Brampton to the new campus. A dedicated lab of thirty microcomputers opened in 1980, the same year a new Brampton campus opened, known as the Davis Campus. By the 1990s, the student population hit 7,500, and plans were in the works to construct new buildings at Trafalgar. Opening in 1999, the Sheridan Centre for Arts & Emerging Technology (SCAET), was the first new building on the campus in a while, but soon a three-wing Sheldon Levey Centre opened in the early 2000s. These were under construction when I started attending Sheridan in 2002. Since my time at Sheridan, I’ve seen a lot of changes; the construction of a Library Learning Commons after the A-Wing expansion saw completion. Three new buildings at Davis and a new campus in Mississauga with two expansions. I helped establish an information technology support presence at the last remaining satellite campus, the Skills Training Centre, and then helped close that campus down. And today, I continue to be proud of being both an alumnus and an employee of the college that continues to make ripples worldwide.
It would be impossible to capture the entire campus with a single sheet without getting some way to get my Crown Graphic into the air and being held steady enough to make the shot. So instead, I went with one of my first views of the college, the SCAET building. It was the newest building on campus when I started. And while I only had a few classes there, the modern design still draws my eye today. I set up near a small garden that was recently completed to honour the indigenous land the college is constructed on. I also had to be careful where I positioned myself due to the sun’s location in the sky, and by adding the foreground elements and using the 125mm lens, I added a bit more than the building alone. I probably should have opened up the shadows by metering for them instead of average, but this isn’t a bad image.