Camp Life: Photos

Yesterday we got a BIG RAIN! It started just before Flag and continued until we went to bed, thus our scheduled EP (an outside game called “Around the World”) was swapped with Movie Night. It rained almost 4 inches in 4 hours (a huge amount of rain) but the camp did great! The counselors, Head Staff, Maintenance, Men Staff, Health Hut…. everyone really pulled together and it was a lot of fun.

Technical difficulties forced us to move the Junior group from White Hall to the Pavilion, but they were thrilled to see Princess Diaries with the rest of the camp. Such a fun movie, everyone was singing and dancing… so much fun.

Today the chances of rain go down considerably and the sun is out. Temperatures will start to rise and by next week we will be enjoying nintey degree summer days to finish out our June Camp session. The old timers always say “if you don’t like the weather, just wait”… they might mean it in a pessimistic way, but I take it as an encouragement!

I will take a moment to talk photos… for we have gotten some questions from parents about finding their daughter in the midst of so many photos. It probably is a good idea to share with you our philosophy of photography as an encouragement.

We work very hard on our photographs each summer. It starts with preparation: we hire a professional photographer (Julie Mallett, her galleries are always indicated with “JMP”) to come out from time to time, we hire counselors with a strong photography background (often with aspirations to one day be a professional artist), we purchase great equipment (mosly Nikon DSLR’s with good lenses), I take a personal interest (I like to take photos daily if possible), and we make a detailed plan to cover every day. Thus we provide you MANY photographs every day in an effort to get multiple photos of every camper every day (looks like we got 2,600 yesterday), but our effort is not perfect (no EP photographs yesterday bc we were dealing with the rain, sometimes don’t get multiple photos of every camper).

The reasons for this effort is simple:

• We love camp and think that great pictures will spread that love more effectively than words. Just scrolling through a folder gives you an idea of what camp is like, and it is absolutely wonderful!
• We want you to have some great pictures of your girls. We hope that you will come away from this camp session with some pictures that really capture the joy of childhood in your girl. Many of my favorite pictures of my daughters came from camp… here they are most naturally “themselves” and if we take enough pictures, we might get a perfect one for you.
• We want you to really understand us when we say “things are great”. Many of you have not experienced camp life before and the blog alone doesn’t get it done… but a single happy picture makes everything better. We completely “get it” and want to help.
• Great photos are great marketing. The more you love the photos of camp life and display them on your phone, computer, wall, photo book, or whatever… the more likely it is that Greystone will look good to prospective campers!

We listen to you and make it a high priority to meet your expectations with regard to photos. To this end, if you have a suggestion to improve our service we want to hear about it! Last summer you suggested we took too many photos, and we have reduced the quantity accordingly. Galleries get unwieldy with more than 1,000 photos in it if your internet connection is not strong… so we try to keep the galleries smaller. You asked for free downloads, and we found a way of providing this service for you. You asked for inexpensive prints and we cut a deal for rock bottom prices on top quality prints (the prints really are excellent if you are more of a “real picture” person). So if you have any suggestions, let us know! We listen and we respond!

In like fashion, if you like something about photos… let us know. We assume that we are meeting your expectations if we don’t hear from you, but we don’t know for certain if we don’t hear positive input. We sometimes change things that you like just because we didn’t know you liked it the “old way”.

One last thing about helping us get some great shots of your daughter. The best way to get them is to email your camper directly and ask her to “get in front of the camera!”. There are some girls who simply do not want their picture taken (my youngest daughter is one of these… she literally holds her hand in front of her face). There are others who are just not captured because of the MANY girls who absolutely LOVE having their picture taken. If a photographer is asked, they ALWAYS take a photo… thus you will see some girls with TONS of pictures and others are far fewer. The bottom line, if a girl does not want her picture taken, it is possible for her to be successful in that goal!

We are having a great day and grateful for your support.