This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while. This summer I was a photographer at Camp Lebanon. I have also talked to other people that have been the photographer at a summer camp, and we all seem to come to the same conclusion.
Camp photography is something very unique. Even if you are a photography, camp photography is something completely different then what you are used to.
It's different in the sense that you can't time to take pictures. You can pose pictures, everything is happening so fast, you don't have time to really think, you just have to shoot. You may also be used to shooting in manual, taking a single shot at a time, and saving it to a raw file. This will not work for camp. You have so many things you need to take pictures of, you can't really shoot in manual (certain times are a must though) or take just one frame at a time. You also have so many pictures to go through, and you need to have those pictures usable by people that may not know how to process raw, so you need to shoot in jpeg.
Another thing is picture ownership. You slave all summer trying to get the best shot you can, and then you really don't have much ownership in that picture. That picture is used for promotional stuff, it's given (or at least we did) to people who bought the weekly slideshow, and to any of the staff that may ask for pictures. While I am completely for open source, Creative Commons type stuff, it does get a little annoying to have that one picture you slaved for (example a sweet lightning picture I spent 4 hours to get, in the rain, it killed my camera, hardest shot I have ever got) and then you use it in a slideshow. Then it gets all over Facebook, without any credit to you. With a shoot I slaved to get, it's really annoying that I don't get any credit.
Another annoying thing, I posted small sample images to the web, and put a watermark on it. People would take that picture and put it on Facebook, or print it off. The whole point of the watermark was so people wouldn't do that.
I could go more into copyright stuff, but I'll save that for another post maybe.
Even though I've seen my pictures posted all over the place, I always can tell which ones are mine. That's because I have a certain style. If you've seen my pictures from the summer, you know what I'm talking about. That makes it a little better because my pictures are very unique, so when they are in an album with a bunch of other pictures they may have taken, mine stand out.
But overall. Camp photography is one of the hardest jobs.
