Barry Perlus

David Evan Todd.

Incoming students are typically advised to make the most of their time at Cornell. Fifth-year student David Evan Todd has taken that dictum further than most.

He is a member of the Cayuga's Waiters a cappella group and Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. He designs brochures and provides photography for Cornell Outdoor Education, is an active member of the group and he recently led his fourth Wilderness Reflections outing for incoming freshmen. Todd also is earning two degrees, a B.F.A. in photography and a B.A. in American studies with an additional concentration in visual studies.

The fourth Cornellian in his family, Todd, 23, of Chappaqua, N.Y., studied photography abroad in the spring of 2004, via the Cornell in Rome program.

"I've spent some summers here, too; it's expected," Todd says. "You have to complete all the requirements for both degrees separately."

Todd's academic career was influenced early on by American studies program chair R. Laurence Moore, who's now his adviser.

"I was just looking into the major, and right away the two of us each became interested in what the other was working on," Todd says. "I may have been the first fine arts student to approach him. Cornell's a huge school, there are so many things you can get interested in. It's important to pursue your niches here."

David Evan Todd

Todd made a series of 3-D images of Cornell scenes in the winter with a stereographic camera he built for a photography class.

He's pursued several in photography alone. In a class taught by Professor Barry Perlus, "one technical assignment was to create your own camera," Todd said. "So I built a stereo camera out of two cheap cameras and started shooting my own 3-D images."

In Rome, Todd made large, pictorial digital prints on canvas. "Obviously painting is huge there," he says. "So these images were purposely done in a painterly fashion, very soft -- soft lighting, soft palettes."

He also made a habit of snapping photos on his daily walk to campus. "You see all kinds of things in Collegetown you don't see anywhere else," he says.

Todd wants to bring his two degree programs together in his photography thesis. "I've been toying with the identity of the American man as subject matter to play with," he says.

With Cayuga's Waiters, Todd sings on campus and has traveled from New York City to Miami and Vancouver, singing traditional school songs, standards, current pop hits and parodies such as "We Didn't Go to Harvard," based on the Billy Joel hit "We Didn't Start the Fire."

Todd is the group's unofficial art director, creating photographs, chalkings, concert posters and CD art. He says he wants to write a book about the Waiters, a Cornell tradition founded in 1949 as a subset of the Cornell Glee Club.

"I can't imagine Cornell without the Waiters," Todd says. "It's such a large part of my Cornell experience."