Over the course of a semester, students enrolled in Anna Manning’s Photo Imaging classes, and other student photographers, will take thousands of photos.
“A shoot could have anywhere from 100 to 400 photos, and we do 16 of those per semester in Photo 2,” Allie Albright, 10, said.
Of the photos that Photo Imaging student’s take, a small number of them are published in the Bronco Yearbook or on Stampede News.
“I did three or four shoots for Photo Imaging, so I would say [I took] about 800 to 1000 pictures… I know at least three of them got published, I had two in the yearbook [last year] and one on Stampede News,” Hadley Booze, 10,
said.
With a small percentage of photos student’s take being published by SPUB, most photographers have found ways to share them in other ways.
“I post [my photos] on Instagram… If I do a football shoot, I send them to football families and the boys who play,” Booze said.
Similar to Booze, Caleb Brewer, 12, also uses the photos they take to help others.
“We have these projects that we do in Photo Imaging; I recently just did one for one of my friends and I did her senior pictures,” Brewer said.
Under-published student photography is not the only issue that they face. Another issue that student photographers run into is not knowing when their photos are being published.
“I don’t know my photos are published unless I stumble upon it, sometimes I wish that I would be notified if my photos were used online because I think that’s pretty cool,” Ashley Anderson, 10, said.
Anderson was not the only photographer who shared that they would like to be notified when their photos were published.
“I think that [being notified when photos were published] would be nice because we would like to know that our work and contributions [as photographers] mean something,” Albright said.
Even knowing that their work might not be shared, or that they might not know their work is shared, many student photographers continue to take upper level photography classes, and contribute by submitting photos to be used on Stampede News or in the Bronco Yearbook.
“The reason I really submit my photos is because I wanna see everybody else have them and I wanna see other reporters and writers use my work because then it’s really showing two different artists combine in the same work,” Booze said.
Photography taken by students might not always be shared as often as they want it to, but these student photographers do see the huge contribution they are making to SPUB and other school resources that might need their photos.
