Photography Summer Camp in San Diego
Last week was a blast. I had more fun than I had expected, but I am also way more tired than I thought possible. My admiration for teachers have increased ten fold. Entertaining kids for an entire week is exhausting. Imaging doing that for months at end?!
But I am still so happy we decided to to our Photography Summer Camp here in San Diego. We ended up having 4 kids attend our first week at our photography portrait studio by SDSU. Four amazing, funny and incredibly creative girls aged 8-15 came to learn more about cameras and photography in general.
Photography Summer Camp Curriculum
Since this was a beginning course in photography, I wanted to teach the kids the basics of photography before we got in to the technical aspects. We started with the history of photography, like when the first photograph was published, what cameras used to look like in the beginning and how they’ve developed throughout the years.
The girls thought it was really interesting to look at our collection of vintage cameras and see the difference between an old film camera compared to the DSLRs they were using during their summer camp week. But they weren’t just there to hear me drag on about history, so we soon began learning the technical aspects of their cameras. What they buttons are for, how to set them up to control the exposure and how to properly focus on a subject.
The kids were soon off running around in the studio taking pictures of this and that, laughing and exploring all at the same time.
Pet Photographers in the making
Our second day was spent learning about all the different types of photography one can specialize in. One of them being a pet photographer. So of course we had to test that out, and my English Bulldog Gerrard was more than happy to comply being their pet model.
I honestly couldn’t tell you who had more fun, Gerrard or the girls. They took so many beautiful pictures of him both in the studio and outside as we went for a little walk. There were happy smiles all around and at the end of the day the girls were asking if he’d be back, and Gerrard was snoring happily on the floor exhausted from all the attention.
Amazing Capture by one of our students, Darlene!
Exploring their creative side
The rest of the week we explored our creative side using fun props to enhance our pictures. We learned how to capture reflections or making people look like big giants are small like ants. We also chatted about using leading lines to draw your viewers attention to your focal point, and how framing your subjects will help with that as well.
Thursday we did a half day field day to Mission Trails and led the kids on a photo hike to learn more about nature photography and landscape photography. The kids truly enjoyed it and had so much fun putting to use everything they’d learned throughout the week.
Our last day at the studio was spent playing water games, learning how to capture water balloons exploding in high speed and watched videos on creative edits like composites.
Needless to say the week was a SUCCESS and the kids and I had so much fun together. We are so excited for our next Photography Summer Camp in August (Sign your kids up here now!) and to host another summer camp in San Diego again next year.
