Depth of Experience

Sundown before the evening activity at Camp

It’s hard to fathom that 20 years have passed since my first summer volunteering at Camp Not-A-Wheeze, a week-long Arizona camp for kids with asthma held at Friendly Pines Camp in Prescott AZ.  I’ve done a variety of jobs there from living in cabins with kids to staffing the infirmary and have served on the Planning Committee.  Of course I’ve always taken pictures, but this year that was my defined job.  

I have a few thoughts about that.

Infirmary nurse Ana Marin checking out a camper

It was a bit odd at first not to be involved with the medical aspects of camp this year.  I did pitch in here and there but mostly I photographed.

I’m much better at photography than at herding cats, which is a large part of serving as medical staff in the cabins.  Some years were delightful and some not so much, but I suspect that medical volunteers with kids of their own might be better at the crowd control portion of the job than I.

A cabin group on the meadow

As I’ve observed before, there are aspects of photographing events involving kids at camp that resemble wildlife photography.  My friend Greg McKelvey blogged eloquently about this recently and I, too, learned a great deal about wildlife photography from our mentor, Bruce Taubert.  Kids move quickly and are unpredictable.  Kids, like wildlife, make better models when they forget you’re there with a camera.  Lots of technical considerations learned from photographing grizzly bears can be applied to this setting.

Rendezvous, the end-of-camp ceremony

Finally, this experience at camp was a stellar example of the advantage of being familiar with what I’m photographing.  I know people and schedules well.  I know when the light will be good at the rock climbing wall and know folks who will clue me in when something is happening in the infirmary.  I was excited to photograph things that no one really had before; medication time in the cabins, Flag raising, and the ceremony held on the last night of Camp.  This kind of familiarity is important in landscape photography as well, but things move much more quickly at camp.  If not for 20 years of experience, I would have missed a lot.

Horned Lizard

 And sometimes, I even run into actual wildlife out there.