Ray’s family moved to a summer camp in a valley in southwestern Wisconsin when he was six. He helped with work projects during camp weeks as a little kid, came back as a camper every summer from age eight until he graduated high school, and worked on staff through high school and into college. Family still works there today.

Kelly worked there too. She did graphic design and was a dorm leader, and the two of us were on staff together around the time we started dating. She didn’t shoot the weekly videos, but she lived the same weeks: the schedule, the activities, and the everyday chaos of a camp full of kids. It’s also where we got to know each other.

Most of how we photograph a wedding started there.

Here are the two of us from those camp years, including one kayaking down a river. It was a few years ago. :)

Ray worked just about every job a camp has

He ran a small nature tent. As a teenager he was the one who came down each day to make sure the animals got fed, and when the chores were done he’d wander the property. He wasn’t headed anywhere. He liked being out there. He learned where the morning light came into the valley and which trails went where. None of it was on the camp map.

He was a dorm leader for several summers, and so was Kelly. It’s its own education in reading a room full of kids who don’t want to go to sleep. A wedding morning, with a room full of people who are tired, excited, and nervous all at once, isn’t that different.

And when the camp started making photos and videos of each week, Ray was on the team that did it, and he ended up running it.

You can’t pose a camp week

The assignment was simple. Tell the story of the week so the campers could take it home. Every week ended with a video.

Nothing at camp holds still for a photo. Kids don’t wait for you, and the best moment of the day usually happens on the walk back from the zipline while everyone is looking somewhere else. So you learn to stay close, keep your eyes open, and stay out of the way. Kids forget about the camera fast. That’s when the good stuff shows up.

You also learn to shoot in whatever you’re handed. Hard noon sun. A dark building at night. A campfire lit by nothing but the campfire. Rain.

That’s still the job at a wedding. We tell the story of the day as it happens, in whatever light and weather it happens in. It’s why we call ourselves photographers for people who don’t like posing. We learned from more than a hundred kids a week who wouldn’t pose for anything.

Storms made the best nights

The camp sits in a valley with a small creek running through it. In a hard rain that creek could turn into a real river. When storm warnings came through, everyone packed into one of the main buildings and stayed up late so no one wandered out near the water. It was always a fun night, everybody hunkered down together, waiting it out.

Up the hill, a quarter mile from the main camp, were Adirondack cabins: three log walls, a roof, and one side open to the woods. You’d lay your sleeping bag on the hard floor and sleep out. At least a couple of times the rain caught Ray’s group up there. The hike back was too far in the dark, so they sat it out all night, trying to stay dry while the wind blew rain in the open side.

We think about those nights every time a couple sends us a worried forecast. Rain on a wedding day is rarely the disaster people expect, and some of our favorite weddings happened in it.

Some stories never made the weekly video

The head cook changed from week to week. Some traded banter with the staff. Some spoiled them with snacks and ice cream bars.

One night Ray and a friend from the video team decided to help themselves. The friend crawled in through a kitchen window and grabbed a few snacks from the back. They closed everything up and slipped out. Nobody would ever know.

The next morning the cooks found a shoe print in the dust, right down the length of the counter. They matched it to his shoe. Caught red-handed, and a proper scolding followed.

The bathhouse at the far end of camp had a water heater that lasted about an hour of morning showers. If you heard the early crowd get going, you knew you’d be showering cold. So one morning Ray and a few friends turned the heater off. Everyone else got a cold shower and went looking for someone to blame, while Ray’s crew sat nearby looking as confused as anyone. They switched it back on right before their own turn.

The cold showers are useful for more than a laugh. If you’re planning a camp wedding, ask about hot water. Camp bathhouses are built for campers showering in shifts, not sixty wedding guests getting ready on the same Saturday morning. We cover that and the rest of the practical side in what to know before renting a summer camp for your wedding.

We recognize a camp the minute we get there

When a couple books a camp for their wedding, the place feels familiar even if we’ve never been. The dining hall, the fire ring, the cabins everyone jokes about, the path down to the water. We know the evening light will come through the trees sideways, and we know the best photo of the weekend might happen during a game of shuffleboard.

Camp weddings also tend to run longer than a day. Guests stay the weekend. There’s a campfire the night before and a slow breakfast after. That gives us far more to photograph than a ceremony and a reception, and it’s the kind of wedding we like best.

If you’re considering one, start with our list of the best camp wedding venues in Wisconsin. For a camp we’ve photographed three times, see our Camp Wandawega venue guide.

Camp taught us to wait for the real moment

We didn’t dig out old photos from those camp weeks. Pictures of other people’s kids from years ago won’t show you much about your wedding day.

These will. Every photo below comes from a wedding we photographed, and none of them were posed. We stayed close, kept out of the way, and waited for people to forget about the camera. It’s the same way we covered a camp week, in whatever light, weather, and chaos the day handed us.

If that’s how you’d like your wedding remembered, we’d love to hear from you.