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Death Valley Photography Workshops

Lori and I love to visit and explore Death Valley National Park, and we love showing other photographers what we’ve found. Death Valley has it all: exotic desert landscape photography, Milky Way night photography, wildflower and wildlife photography, weather photography. We can often go from sand dunes and dried mud cracks up to Joshua trees and even snow in the same day. We have compositions that benefit from the compass direction and elevation of the sun (the lighting varies a LOT from December to March/April). We’ve honed our camera positions over the years for various subjects and locations at various times of day.

Death Valley Winter Light w/Black and White
December 8-13, 2024
$1695  Half full! Enroll soon.
Outside of a rare spring wildflower “super bloom,” low angle winter light is probably the most attractive thing to go to Death Valley for, as described here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” This session will be similar to the December Winter Light workshop, but with more emphasis on black and white photography, utilizing lines, shapes, textures, tones and light to emphasize subjects in strong compositions. We’ll host a post-processing session or two. As a potential bonus, if there’s late fall/early winter rain, the winter months offer the best conditions for standing water to remain on Badwater Salt Flats: cooler temperatures, low wind, and a saturated water table below. In December 2019 the water in Badwater lasted 5 weeks, in 2023-24 it lasted months, well into the next spring!
More information here.  Sample images here.

Death Valley Spring and Night Photography Workshop
March 2-7, 2025
$1695  Just opened for registration!
We’ll explore Death Valley’s sand dunes, salt flats, eroded badlands, and spectacular vistas. It also has sites with a rich history of gold, talc and borax mining. We like this timing to shoot the Park, before the worst of the oncoming heat. We also timed this to be close to the new moon date, so we will be able to shoot pre-dawn Milky Way in this “International Dark Sky Park” as well. While a “super bloom” is uncommon, we monitor rainfall in the area and usually find a few decent patches of wildflowers. The timing peaked from late February into early March in 2016, so we should have good timing in early March if the weather gives us another super bloom year. We watch rains in the fall and where plants are growing in December, so we have a head start on where to look when we return. In the 2023-24 season the water in Badwater lasted through March and beyond! Click here for more details and registration.

Death Valley Adventure Photography Workshop (Racetrack, etc)
March 28 – April 2, 2025
$1695  Just released for registration!
When I was researching my “Photographing California” guidebook, I wanted to cover Death Valley thoroughly. We explored a number of remote roads, valleys and ridges, and found some unique and compelling sites that few get to see. Our objective will be show you the Racetrack and the tallest dunes on the West Coast (nearly 700 feet high), when we can also capture Milky Way. To shoot at night in these remote locations, we’ll need to cam. We’ll all need high clearance (at least 8″) and All Terrain rated tires. No 4WD vehicle? No problem! If you want to not subject your vehicle to five days of unpaved road (including Racetrack Road), Jeep rentals are available. Here are some photos from the terrain we’ll cover. We prefer to keep this group extra small. Click here for more details (under construction).

Death Valley Winter Light w/Black and White
December 9-14, 2025
$1695  Coming soon.
Outside of a rare spring wildflower “super bloom,” low angle winter light is probably the most attractive thing to go to Death Valley for, as described here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” This session will be similar to the December Winter Light workshop, but with more emphasis on black and white photography, utilizing lines, shapes, textures, tones and light to emphasize subjects in strong compositions. We’ll host a post-processing session or two. As a potential bonus, if there’s late fall/early winter rain, the winter months offer the best conditions for standing water to remain on Badwater Salt Flats: cooler temperatures, low wind, and a saturated water table below. In December 2019 the water in Badwater lasted 5 weeks, in 2023-24 it lasted months, well into the next spring!

In some years we get favorable dark sky conditions to shoot the Perseid meteor shower. In 2025 we’ll have escellent conditions: no moon for dark skies most of the night, then only a 25% crescent for the last 3 hours or so, to softly light up the foreground.
More information here Sample winter Death Valley images here.
Contact us to be notified when this workshop releases.

We hope that you can join us for one of our Death Valley National Park landscape photography workshops in 2024-2025!

You may know that Jeff and  Lori traveled from 2010-2014 researching and writing the 320-page guidebook “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South” (click here to buy a copy).  It includes 40+ locations in Death Valley National Park. As we look toward producing a Death Valley specific guide, our location list has grown to 200+ sites in Death Valley so far. We still have a long “to do” list of places to explore, and the park is conveniently close for us, so we visit the park about 5-6 times per year. In the 2023-2024 season for example, we conducted four workshops and one private tour, and with our personal scouting, we were in the park in November, December, January, Feburary, March and April.

Written guides are a great option for people who have the time and can invest the days to visit a lot of sites, but if you want to chase the light most efficiently while you cover a park this large, there’s no substitute for our real-time guiding, with local guides who have deep experience and in-depth knowledge. Some of our clients are expereinced photographers and prefer the guiding service only, but we also offer instruction, composition guidance and feedback for whoever also wants that. We don’t withhold our “secret spots”; Jeff’s ring tone is “Stand By Me”. One client wrote that they liked we “weren’t competitive”… it never even occurred to us that aguide’s comeptition with cleints could event be a thing! Yet we experienced it firsthand: one trip leader showed up with clients at night where we were already shooting, waded out into Lake Manly (in front of our open shutters), and proceeded to shoot for hours in front of us (and in front of this jerk’s own cleitns), telling us to “edit them out”. It was a specatulalry rude and clueless thing to do; we were shotoing timelapse sequences. 

We personally lead all of our workshops. We get a lot of returning clients, so we must be doing something right! We don’t want to waste our own time by visiting a park in a sub-optimal time, so you can be sure that we’re planning every trip for a peak season, down to the best individual days for maximum opportunity: sun elevation and angle, wildflowers, Milky Way, moon rises, meteor showers, and so on. We monitor real time weather forecasts including wind and storm track predictions, sunrise and sunset forecasts, and we do meticulous planning around astronomical events.

With about 75 visits to the Park in the last 15 years alone, we have the experience to make great decisions on when to ditch our anticipated itinerary and upgrade our chances of stunning conditions. A perfect example was when we met our clients near Mesquite Flat Dunes on a December afternoon for our first sunset together in the park, but we decided to make the drive down to Badwater salt flats, where we felt that sunset color was more likely to happen. Not only were we treated to one of the most spectacular sunsets of our lives, reflected in still, salty water, but we heard the next day that there was no colorful sunset at Mesquite Flat at all. This is where it’s critical that Lori and I are present, and we have “skin in the game”: this is our time in the park too, we’re not just showing up at spots to cross them off a list on a fixed itinerary. We’re going to try to optimize opportunities for landscape photography during every minute of every day. And often into the night.

During Covid we’ve run small groups of up to 4-8 participants, and we were able to provide such great service, we’re maintaining about a 4:1 client to instructor ratio, or less, again in 2024-2025. Carpooling is entirely optional (we would never require that everyone pack into a “super spreader” vehicle), meals will be in large, airy rooms or take-out / outdoors whenever practical. We do what we can to accomodate personal choice and give everyone peace of mind.

A quick note on preparedness and safety: personally, we like to explore some of the more remote areas of the Park, so we have to be able to get ourselves and others back out in the event of typical vehcle issues. Most of our trips are lodging-based and aren’t “roughing it” or “four wheeling”, but there are a lot of short dirt access roads. Being local, we carry an extensive tire repair kit and air pumps to re-inflate tires in the event of uncommon mishaps. On one trip to the Racetrack, Jeff plugged three flat “street tires” (which is why we recommend All Terrain rated tires for all vehicles on our annual Adventure trip which aims to go to the Racetrack), and the air compressor got a lot of use that day). We know why many tire inflation pumps fail, and we know which one(s) to carry. We carry a tow strap, and we towed someone (not in our gruop) when she took a wrong turn into a sandy wash. We have satellite communication capability. Jeff has patched at least four client tires on different workshops, and usually before the client has had time to access their own spare tire changing kit in case that’s needed (it usually isn’t. In a park with sometimes rough conditions, there’s a lot to be said for experience when it comes to safety! Can another workshop led by someone who flies into the area about once a year offer you this level of preparedness?  , so you always know who you’re getting. We usually have many returning cleints, so we mut be doing something right.

2024-2025 Workshop Calendar, Great Basin School of Photography

Both owners Jeff and Lori lead groups of 8 photographers, for a 4:1 guide to client ratio.

September 26-30, 2024  Eastern Sierra Fall Colors Landscapes, Bodie Interiors &Night Photography (1 sunrise/interior session, 1 night in Bodie) Full!

November 10-15, 2024  Yosemite Fall Colors  $1695. FULL, waitlist only! 

December 8-13, 2024  Death Valley Winter Light Photography  $1695  New, Just opened!

February 18-23, 2025  Yosemite Horsetail Fall & Winter Photography  $1695  New, Just opened!

March 2-7, 2025  Death Valley Spring Photography  $1695  New, Just opened!

March 28 – April 2, 2025  Death Valley Adventure (The Racetrack, etc.) $1695  New, Just opened!

May 10-14, 2025  Yosemite Spring and Moonbow Photography  $TBD  On demand, contact us to schedule. Great for a club/small group.

May 2025  Nevada Ghost Towns Photography  $TBD  On demand, contact us to schedule. Great for a club/small group.

June 2025  Bodie, Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Landscape & Night Photography $TBD  (2 nights in Bodie, annual trip) Contact us for notification when we have date reservations

June 2025  Night Photography Bootcamp $TBD  On demand, contact us to schedule. Great for a club/small group.

July 2025  Bodie, Mono Lake, Eastern Sierra Landscape & Night Photography $TBD  (1 or 2 nights in Bodie) Contact us for notification when we have date reservations.

November 1-6, 2025  Yosemite Fall Colors  $1695  Coming soon, contact us to schedule.