Student Photographers

Thank you for being a part of the EIU Marketing & Communications photography team! Capturing the essence EIU's campus can be a rewarding pursuit, and having a team of students helps add to the authenticity of our imagery and brand.

This position is very independent in that we want you to photograph parts of campus life that appeal to you and you are involved in. There are also times when we need students to cover specific events. Please be open to doing both.

This page is meant to house some useful resources that should help you get the job done.

Picking up assignments

All assignment work will be posted through Deputy. Once you are hired on as a photographer you will get access to the Deputy account and you should download the app for easy access to the schedule. You can also expect to receive weekly emails with that same schedule or other subjects we may be looking for that can be shot at any time. 

Time

As a student worker you are limited to working 20 hours per week. Because of Marketing & Communications budget allocation for student workers, your actual hours will most likely be under that limit. It is crucial that you stay under that threshold, because if you exceed it you will automatically lose your position and it is difficult to get reinstated. Keep track of your working hours (shooting and post processing) and ensure you enter that time honestly.

Workflow

After you shoot your assignment it is important for you to be efficient in your post-processing work. Many of the events you are covering will be timely and we will want to share them to social media as soon as possible. Submission can be done through OneDrive, Dropbox, GoogleDrive or whatever file sharing or cloud based storage system you like. However, we do want you to select your top images, edit and caption them. Submit a folder of "Originals" AND a folder of "Edits". A good folder structure should look something like this:

Your raw/unedited photos go in the Originals folder and your finished/edited images go in the Edits folder. Those are the ones that will be reviewed before posting. The entirety of the shoot will be archived. 

In addition to selecting your favorite images and editing them in your editor of choice, you should also apply captions to these images so that they have some relevance in searches and for future posterity. This can be done in Photoshop or as a batch in Adobe Bridge. A good caption file can be found here and instructions on how to apply such a file can be found below.

Contact Jay Grabiec (jjgrabiec@eiu.edu) with any questions on this workflow or other campus photography related issues.