My Summer Behind a Lens

What’s it like to spend a summer working as an apprentice for a photographer in the Cayman Islands?

Recently I’ve gotten a lot of questions about a typical day at work for me, but truly there is no typical day! So its more of a typical week: I wake up every morning when Mark leaves at 7:30am and have a few hours to myself to read and write and putter around on the internet. This is also when I get my share of the housework done (I clean, he cooks — lucky me!) before I go to my apprenticeship. On land-based days, work is a variety of things — lots of marketing, editing and of course shooting. My boss Heather has been shooting for years and has a degree in photojournalism but only opened her business here in January. Therefore, marketing is a big project, and luckily I love it and feel like its an area I can be really helpful in. Shooting is of course at the heart of what we’re doing and already I’ve second-shot weddings, portrait sessions, and some condo photography so its a nice variety and I’m getting great stuff for my portfolio.

Heather shooting

Me, um, shooting

A few times a week I’m out the door at 7:30 for the underwater photo/video trips. The underwater portion of this job is really cool but a bit stressful as its the only part where people are going to be looking at what I do no matter what. (As opposed to second shooting where we just throw in my “best of” shots for the clients). We accompany a dive company’s stingray city sandbar trips, filming everyone and trying to tell the story of the whole trip. Then on the way back I get to flex my retail sales muscles and try to get people to buy a copy of the movie I’ve spent three hours filming! I can see how this would get boring after a while since it’s the same thing every time but I’m still high on the novelty of it all, so I’m in heaven.

Then comes the weekend. Mark gets one day off a week, so we try to spend that day together though Friday is unfortunately a popular day for shoots. Usually I have one other day where I’m not working which I take to have some solo beach time, go to yoga, read and write this blog! So there you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about a week in the life of a photography intern.