"Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."

After I was done with Around the Campfire, I figured I had spent my last days working at Camp Anokijig. As the summer rolled around two years later, I initially applied thinking I'd fall back on camp if I don't find something better later. Quickly, though, the camp admin came back to me with an offer I couldn't refuse: building and directing a brand new digital photography program, from the ground up, after its' hiatus from the camp for two years due to the pandemic. I leapt at the opportunity, and by winter I was the incoming Director of Digital Photography at Camp Anokijig.

Photography is wonderful and special.

When you have a camera in your hands what can come out feels like magic. With the accessibility of computational photography, everyone has access to devices that make photography easy and give out good results, without having to mess around with any settings. So to teach photography, then, is something different than the normal way someone would teach a craft: you aren't teaching the how as much as you are the why. Teaching students how to think like a photographer became my goal, in a way that was as exciting, easy and accessible as possible. We'd chase the things that made camp great: the personal agency, the flexibility, the opportunity to learn and hone skills. And we'd have fun doing it.

Building the Digital Photo program has to be one of the most fun notetaking sessions I've ever done. Watching it work, in real life, was a feeling that's hard to describe.

The program I built consisted of skill levels and projects: each project teaching students a different aspect of photography, asking them to work with a limitation, giving them specific goals of what to shoot and how to shoot it. At the start it's easier stuff like "Take a new profile picture for you and a friend," to help teach them portraits, or "Recreate a classic album cover," to teach arranging your scene. By the end, it became Photoshop challenges, photo essays, Alphabet challenges (one photo for every letter from A-Z) and more. The challenges and skill levels came along side a 6 day curriculum for students that signed up, including photo walks and studio sessions, that walked them through not only taking photos but also helped them better understand the philosophy of it. For most of the class, they were given free time to work on their own projects, which they got to choose. And alongside both of those were special free time challenges, like 'Assassin,' where young photographers would hunt down their target (a knowing, participating staff member) and have to take a photo of them before they got spotted, food photography with candy (where the students of course get to eat the candy they take photos of), Survivor-style competitions, and more.

I'm incredibly proud of this program. I think it leverages the best of the resources I had to create something truly special. asdasdasd

I got to manage a team of anywhere from 1-4 other staff members in running the program, something that provided really wonderful leadership and management experiences for me. I can't thank everyone I worked with enough for their incredible effort.

There's really nothing like coming up with a program like this, thinking of how students might react to things, what they might learn, and then seeing it happen. Watching kids become invested in their skill level, in leveling up their photography, doing amazing projects, meant the world to me. A few of the photos campers took are attached to this post-- it's just a taste of the work that's so good I legitimately printed out a bunch of their photos to hang up on my wall. It's really stunning.

At the end of the day, we taught nearly 3000 campers about photography, gave out 100+ awards, and launched a program to huge success. It's really one of the things I'm the most proud of doing and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to help lift up the next generation of great photographers. I'd like to think I made an impact-- I even had one reach back out to see if I could photograph her bat mitzvah.

A couple of highlights are below, but you can also find detailed pages for both my photos and the best of my student's photos over the 2 years I worked with the DigPho program.