Bloglander

To get photos for the Summer Camps guide in this week's issue, The Inlander planned something a little different. Here are some of the photos and how the idea came about.

From the Art Director, Chris Bovey:

We do the Summer Camps issue every year, and we usually end up running stock camp images. Pretty bland and generic, so this year I had an idea to make our own summer camp: Camp Inlander.

I gathered up 12 or so kids and found a location in Liberty Lake that would work as our camp for the day. There was canoeing, cabins, swimming, s’mores — it was the whole camp experience jammed into five hours. The amazing thing was the kids didn’t even really know this was a photo shoot. It turned into a real camp. I found myself wanting to set up poses, but in the end the great images were the kids just enjoying themselves at camp for a day.

The part I will always take away is one of the kids saying at the end, “It is always so hard to say goodbye to all the new friends you make at camp.”

From the Photographer, Stephen Schlange:

The photography shoot for the summer camp issue was fairly unique in my experience with The Inlander. It was longer than most shoots, taking most of a day and the subject matter was kids.

We knew that to pull off natural-looking photos we had to make it actually feel like camp so that they wouldn't be required to pose all day long. My mantra when photographing is “don’t ask them to smile, make them laugh” —the idea being that genuine emotion always comes through better than a pose.

I knew we succeeded when a 6-year-old asked me at the end of the day when the next camp was. Pretend camp became real camp for the kids and that’s why it worked.