It’s true …Every photo tells a story! But if you don’t have the pictures at the end of the summer it’s going to be very hard to recapture that narrative and convey it to your audience.
Camp photographers and counselors are rarely looking through their lens from a marketing point of view. They are tasked with taking pictures of every child to upload each day to appease their respective parents. That’s an important job! But sometimes, those pictures lack the quality and variety that we need to promote the camp effectively.
Before summer begins, put together a shot sheet that outlines every angle, activity, and moment you want to be captured by the end of the summer. Consider beauty shots such as the sun rising over the lake, flowers tussled by the breeze, hot plates of food ready to be eaten, or little feet running on the trail. Make sure to photograph the exteriors of every building, the entrance of your property, signage, and the flagpole. And remember: you are going to need both vertical and horizontal photos for different purposes!
As your photographers go about their day, they can cross items off the predetermined list of shots and begin creating a bank of marketing pictures. This bank is going to be one of your most important assets throughout the rest of the year! It needs to be organized properly, and the photos must be stored safely. This is something every camp struggles with, as nobody has time during the summer to sort and label thousands of pictures. Ultimately everything gets dumped into one folder.
So what’s the solution? Campfire Creative Marketing recommends you pay your photographer or staff member for an extra week at the end of the season to have them go back and organize the photos on a shared drive and sort them into folders for each activity or other useful category. For instance, archery, soccer, pottery, mealtime, campfires, and friendship to name a few. All camp activities, such as capture the flag, can have their own folder. If you use a photo storage system, then tag the pictures with each category so they are easy to search. This is something your staff member can work on even once they return home. And if they do have some free time during the summer, then they can get a jump start on this time-consuming process.
Once you’ve taken these great images and assembled them into useful categories, you’ll have them ready to use throughout the year on your website, social media, email campaigns, and digital brochures. They’ll be right at your fingertips so you don’t waste any time searching for that perfect picture of a camper eating ice cream or making a slam dunk.