Action Photography

One of the great things about this job is how each day varies from the last in regards to work schedule and the social aspect of the job. Most days are spent moving around the resort capturing the goings on- but you’re not left to your own devices; each day is planned by your team leader to ensure we cover as much action as possible.

A typical day at my resort would go as follows: I wake up around 8:00 am and walk the 5 minute commute from my accommodation to the resort. I typically start shooting at 9:30am, then its a lunch break at 12:00. I now have until 2:30 to eat, edit the morning’s photos and have a break.

This is my favourite time of the day, as depending on how quickly I get my edit done, I can spend around one and a half hours doing activities like windsurfing, sailing, tennis; or sunbathing if I’d rather chill and recharge my batteries!

From 2:30 I’m usually shooting until 4:30/5, then it's time to sit and edit the afternoon’s pictures and upload them before 7:00 pm for the guests to look through.

A couple exceptions to this rough schedule that come to mind:

 - 1 or 2 days in a week I’d be on kiosk duty (where I help guests look through the action photos on tablets) until 10pm.

- If you're photographing waterskiing and wakeboarding (one of the cooler parts of the job in my opinion) that would roughly be shooting with a small break from 7:30am- 3pm (the operating hours for the ski team).

Although there is a set schedule for most days, there is always unpredictability in a resort like this. Kids club schedules are always changing, the weather may affect the day’s plans or you might have to swap your day’s schedule with a colleague.  

All in all though, this became a comfortable daily routine pretty quickly for me. I liked knowing that my day was planned out in advance, but despite this there are always changes, and this unpredictability makes each day different from the last!

Portrait Photography

The beach portraiture was an aspect of the job I felt less confident in before flying out, as my prior experience in this section of photography was lacking. CE had an experienced member, Nathan, fly out for 3 weeks to train the team; we did one session with a family where all 3 of us new photographers took it in turns to lead the shoot with Nathan overseeing/assisting. After that first shoot, we all separately had a shadowing session where we took the lead for most if not all of the shoot with our more experienced member overseeing, and from those sessions we were free to lead our own shoots!

This method of training was really helpful for me, as instead of our more experienced colleague taking the lead for the majority of the shoot and myself/ourselves taking up space behind him, he encouraged us to take the lead so that he could watch and give feedback after the shoot.

As the season went on, I would do at least one shoot a week. Families of 4 or 5 were our most common clientele, but through the season I had three or four families with numbers upwards of 10, in which case we would ideally have two photographers running the show, working together to shoot different combinations of family members; e.g. cousins with other cousins, grandparents with their grandchildren, parents with their kids, coupled parents by themselves etc.



Fast forward to now and I’m more confident in my ability to direct a photoshoot, knowing how to make the family/couple feel more at ease, and perhaps most importantly I have a much stronger portfolio than before.

Equipment

I can admit, I’m a bit of a kit geek when it comes to this section and I understand lots of people find it dull as anything, so I’ll keep it short but to the point!

I wanted to go for the more affordable route when buying my kit because I already had a mirrorless Fujifilm system at home, but that camera (an X-T1) paired with the one lens I had was not suitable for the job due to lack of quick autofocus, slow burst rate and expensive telephoto lens options.

I bought pretty much everything I needed from the ground up- lenses, body, batteries, bags, SD cards, adapters. I ended up spending about £800 total with the intention of selling most of it when I returned home.

So if you, like the rest of my colleagues, already have a camera you think will fit the job well (especially if it's Canon), you most likely won’t have to spend as much as I did.

Here’s what I had:

- Canon 7D Mark II - £300 used

- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM - £230 used

- Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM - £110 used

- Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM - £80 used

The 50mm and the telephoto were essential lenses for this job because 90% of the time around the resort a 70-200 lens or similar will do the trick. When we're on power boats shooting sailing and windsurfing, or on a ski boat shooting waterskiing, this is an essential lens because your subject's going to be in the distance more often than not (roughly 10+ metres away). 

The 50mm f/1.8 I used for when I was shooting indoors (the wide aperture is essential for indoor kids activities) but mostly I used it as my portrait lens. This is mainly due to its wide aperture and the subsequent blurry background (bokeh) you get, giving the images that lovely subject separation that customers associate with professional photography. The only drawback to this lens is combined with a cropped sensor it was too tight in some scenarios, meaning I would have to be quite far away from my subjects (typically a family of 4/5) to fit them all in frame. 

The 7D MKII was a great camera for this job for three reasons: It’s price, the burst rate (11fps) and its ruggedness. I purchased the body for around £300 used, which is a great deal considering all the benefits you get from this powerhouse of a camera. I may be wrong but I believe the main reason for most of the older DSLR Canon gear being so cheap nowadays is due to mirrorless systems becoming the go-to for professionals in the last 5-10 years. All this older gear still works perfectly fine, even after years of abuse, due to how well built they are. The 70-200 is a great example of this- they started making these lenses in the mid 90’s! and yet even if you buy a knackered one like I did, it still won’t let you down! I didn’t experience a single hiccup with that lens, or any of the canon lenses for that matter, despite the fact they were being used and abused, day in day out, for 2 and a half months!

That being said, there are obvious drawbacks to the older gear. The main one being autofocus. Don’t get me wrong it’s still fast, but the smart stuff like face tracking that you get with mirrorless/younger DSLR bodies isn’t there. This meant most of the time I was using single-point AF and using the joystick to move the focus point manually because I couldn’t rely on wider AF areas to focus reliably on what I wanted. Most of the activities around the resort were okay for this, waterskiing/wakeboarding for example is very repetitive and predictable, but when it came to more unpredictable subject matter, like portrait shoots, it was challenging at times.

Most of my colleagues had Canon APS-C sensor bodies like mine but younger and subsequently more reliable with autofocus. The main benefit to this when working for CE is that you shoot with a higher number of usable images compared with someone like me. This is because I was often compensating for the lack of focus accuracy by shooting bursts, meaning that I would have more photos to edit and intern making my workflow less efficient.

The social life

Inside and outside of work, this job is a very sociable one! As one of the few photographers around the resort, you quickly learn the names of the majority (if not all!) of the Neilson staff.

At my resort they had three entertainment nights a week for guests. If you’re already familiar with how Neilson holidays work, you’ll know that the staff are part of the fun! Guests come to these resorts expecting the staff to be interactive and welcoming, and often in the evening, especially toward the end of their stay, guests would buy staff drinks as a thanks for a great holiday.

These nights were usually great fun, as you would meet your mates at the bar after a long day of work, have a fun time with the guests you’ve met that week, then you and most of the staff can walk to the local bar in the town for the rest of the night!