Many go into school programs with the expectation of learning, having fun, or sometimes just getting points for their GPA. It’s not often that your class would ever lead directly to a job while you’re still in school – however, that’s exactly what happened to senior Marcus Deane.While taking photos for the homecoming football game, he was spotted by a professional photographer at Foxmar – the same company that does the school photos here at PPCHS and the “leader[s] of South Florida” school and yearbook photography. While he was snapping photos of the game, he was approached by the FoxMar employee. The employee ended up liking his photos so much that he recommended that Marcus call up his boss at FoxMar and get an internship.
“I was really thankful, really excited,” Marcus explains. “I’ve never been a professional photographer or had any training to do something like that.” What truly makes this astounding is the fact that this is just his first year taking photos for the CHAT. Even though he’s a senior at the school, he’s only been in the CHAT for less than a year and is already beginning a photography career in the professional world outside of school.
“I started just about a month ago, my first job was February 1st, it was actually a flag football game, playing at Falcon Cove,” he continues. Deane has worked for about a month now, photographing many different sports games at different schools and then sending the photos back to FoxMar, where they’d be placed in yearbooks. While the internship that Deane got was certainly an incredible accomplishment, it seems to come with one slight downside. “Half the jobs I’ve done are against Pines Charter, so it makes it a little funny-awkward to see a bunch of people from school and be like: ‘hey, I’m here taking photos… but not of you guys.’” Regardless of possible treason, Deane has found himself constantly at the different sports games looking for good shots to take. However, there’s more than just the advantage of being called an intern at FoxMar, he also receives mentorship from professional photographers as he takes his photos, meeting different photographers from the company who teach him how to better his photography.
Internships are a great way to turn a way to learn on-the-job into, well, a real job eventually – but that’s not what Deane plans on doing. He’d rather focus his career on something totally unrelated: flight. “My career goals are to be a pilot, but [photography]’s definitely something I’m very interested in.” He says he’d always like to have photography as a fall-back option for if piloting doesn’t work out. Either way, it’s certainly impressive that he’s landed such an impressive internship in such a short time.
