We’ve reached a major milestone on our workshop program: we celebrated completing ten years of leading landscape and night photography workshops in May! We’ve made some sweeping changes over the past few years. For our night photography workshops in Bodie, we’ve gone from single-night Bodie workshops to 3 and 4-night Bodie workshops with 1-2 nights in Bodie after two practice nights at Mono Lake and up in the High Sierra. Our night photography process has evolved in recent years, from new lighting, to new exposure techniques, to new post-processing workflow and software to increase dynamic range and decrease noise. We’ll guide you through it all, including post-processing.

For national park landscape photography workshops, we have found that while we often enjoy spectacular variable and photogenic weather in our winter and spring Yosemite and Death Valley workshops, weather can interfere with anticipated events we’re trying to catch, like backlit Horsetail Fall or Upper or Lower Yosemite Fall moonbows. So an extra night was added to those itineraries to add 25% more sunsets and nights, and more chances to capture a special annual opportunity. A 5-night itinerary is also more attractive to photographers who want to invest in an airline flight to come out to the West Coast.

Here’s some of the detail:

Yosemite National Park

Yosemite in Fall is another spectacular season where you’ll find fewer crowds, slow flowing Merced River, which is perfect for reflections, and an abundance of colorful leaves from the pastel reds of the dogwood leaves to the golden oaks and yellow cottonwoods, Yosemite in the fall is an amazing time for a visit.  By joining us we’ll guide you to the optimum light for each photographic location as well as some off the beaten path shots that will elicit a few wows from your friends and family. Or date this year will be November 3-8 (5 nights, more information)

For 2023 our winter / Horsetail Fall workshop is February 17-22, then our spring / moonbow workshop May 3-8.

Spring includes multiple opportunities to capture moonbows in Lower Yosemite Falls, Upper Yosemite Falls, and daytime rainbows as well in the spray of Yosemite’s waterfalls in high spring flow. We should also have dogwood trees blooming and other wildflowers as well.

Death Valley National Park

We have three main types of itineraries now in Death Valley, and we’ve just set dates for them for the 2022-2023 season:

– Winter Light: The sun only gets about 30 degrees high in the winter, so the quality of light is high all day, and with a low-rise angle, “golden hour” type light lasts longer. The sand dunes in Death Valley line up in rows from southwest to northeast, so there’s a particular time of day when the curving ridge lines create shadows, and more so when the sun is low, this time of year. If there’s a passing rainstorm that drops enough water on the surrounding mountains to put some water on Badwater salt flats, due to moderate daytime temperatures and low wind, this is the time of year when it lasts the longest (5 weeks in late 2019). Our main dates for the winter light theme are centered around the Geminid meteor shower on December 14, with 3 hours of dark skies before the 70% moon rises. To fully optimize photographic opportunities we’ve fine tuned the workshop itinerary to run a little earlier from December 9-14, 2022.

We’ve added the option to extend it on the front end December 7-9 to catch a sunset full moon rise at Mono Lake (stunning in the calm water of winter), and work our way down the Eastern Sierra to arrive in Death Valley in time for those additional 5 days and nights. We’re not just going through the motions of running photographers through itineraries. We show up for all of our workshops, so we have skin in the game. We’ll bring you to the same spots, show you the compositions we see, offer you the same settings and techniques, and help you understand our post-processing process, so you can optimize your results. We don’t entice you with just a small handful of results, we’ll show you hundreds of results from past Death Valley Winter Light Landscape Photography workshops. If someone can show you more and better locations and results, and if they offer small group tours at a comparable price, seriously, go with them! Your time is precious, you deserve to go with the most experienced guides, with the most location knowledge, who show you their watermarked images so you know they took them, images taken in the same season/light/weather as that specific workshop, who will keep you safe and not force you to share a vehicle next to a coughing Covid ward escapee, and pull it all off at a fair price.

We can add a January session for Winter Light if there’s sufficient interest. It would be perfect to plan with a small group such as a photography club. Note: as of July 19, 2022 for a brief time we can get promotional rates on some of the lodging, but you’d have to book very soon in order to take advantage of that.

– Milky Way and Spring in Death Valley: The main focus for this workshop is the stunning landscapes of Death Valley, but our time and yours is valuable, so we always like to stack opportunities with peak seasonal conditions and night opportunities. Night photography in Death Valley often involves heat, which dramatically increases sensor noise (even using the latest sensors and image-stacking techniques). The “sweet spots” for shooting night images in the “world’s hottest place” is December for the Geminid meteor shower, late February to mid-March for Milky Way (as early in the season as the Milky Way is available without moon interference), and Mid-March into April for higher elevation subjects such as The Racetrack, which can be inaccessible or too cold in the winter. Although a “super bloom” is rare, we usually can find some decent patches where the isolated rain showers have passed through. We’re overdue for a decent El Nino weather pattern year, the condition that sets up a really good to super bloom season, so fingers crossed for a strong wildflower bloom in 2023. The super bloom in 2016 peaked in some locations in mid to late February, others in early March, but most years we do well in early March then if there was sufficiently widespread rainfall and snow, the bloom moves up in elevation into early April. Our date for this itinerary includes dark night skies from February 26 – March 3, which is also ideal for daytime landscapes in Death Valley’s iconic low elevation locations, before heat increases dramatically by mid-to-late March.

We’ve also moved this itinerary a couple of days earlier. This bears repeating: we’re not just going through the motions of running photographers through itineraries! We show up for all of our workshops; we have skin in the game. We’ll bring you to the same best locations, show you the compositions we see, offer you the same settings and techniques, and help you understand our post-processing process, so you can optimize your results. Your time is also extremely valuable. Anyone proposing to show you Death Valley wildflower locations and spring light should be able to show you their deep portfolio of hundreds of images from past years of Death Valley Spring and Wildflower photography workshops. We’re proud of the 15+ years and 60+ visits we’ve invested in getting to know Death Valley National Park, including research for the large Death Valley chapter in Jeff’s guidebook to California landscape photography). We could cherry-pick from 1200+ Death Valley images, but it really seems most ethical to make available to you large subsets relevant to the specific workshop you’re considering. Besides, when you see how different our Death Valley itineraries are, you may wan to join us for several different ones!

– Death Valley “Adventure Series” Workshops: This is the choice for interesting photography beyond the iconic locations that so many visitors shoot. Death Valley includes 3.4 million acres, far too large to cover in a few days, and only 1/3 of the Park’s roads are paved. Many of the most stunning landscapes are hours from Park lodging for sunrise or sunset light, let alone the Milky Way rising at 2am or 3 am in the spring. So it makes the most sense to have a camping-based itinerary, to be conveniently located within close driving and walking distance of interesting locations and compositions. We recommend SUVs and All Terrain tires if possible, but Jeep rentals are available (at a similar price as lodging for our earlier March itinerary). We had someone on our trip this year that had never camped before, and she loved the experience, including driving the Jeep! There’s so much to see, we actually have multiple itineraries for Death Valley workshops that are best accessed via more camping-based itineraries. Our first one on the calendar for 2023 includes dark nights from March 17-22. We can add longer options and additional dates depending upon interest.

All of these dates coincide with California’s storm season, and in extreme desert (Furnace Creek receives only 1.9″ of rain per year) a passing storm is typically great news for photography, with scattered clouds for good sunrises and sunsets.

In addition to these options, custom trips are available. Even after exploring the Park multiple times each year for 16 years, we have some destinations on our bucket list that we haven’t reached yet. Some are more “Expedition” level trips, that Lori and I would also want to rent a Jeep for, both to better ensure that we reach our destinations, but to also reduce the wear and tear on our vehicles on some of the rougher roads. We just had a customer join us for her first camping trip.  She rented a jeep and loved following us as we explored the park.  When we asked her if she would have preferred to be driven around, she emphatically stated “#(& No! It was a blast driving myself!”  So, if you don’t have your own vehicle that you’re comfortable taking off road, a rental jeep is cheaper than most hotel rooms in Death Valley and give you great flexibility.  You’ll need a tent and sleeping bag but those can be rented from REI or use a service like www.outdoorsgeek.com or www.arriveoutdoors.com.  For smaller groups, Lori doesn’t mind organizing dinners and making sure there are numerous full pots of coffee available with breakfast.

We’re updating our Death Valley Web page, just deleted last month’s adventure series workshop, and will add an enrollment link for next year’s adventure trip shortly.

Nevada

We’ve been developing our portfolio of concepts and shooting location access, and in recent years we’ve been able to run workshops of four to five day in Central Nevada (next trip May 1-6, 2022). As a new concept, we’re generating fairly unique images, but the built-in demand is less than with national parks, so groups are particularly small. Although our main focus in historical sites, we cover a lot of ground, so inevitably we run across wildlife (wild horses, American antelope), sometimes wildflowers, and often stunning spring weather and light as we cross wide open Western landscapes.

New for 2022, we hope to be previewing access to a few new sites in the areas of Eastern Nevada that we’ve bene exploring for years now. We may be able to add a workshop or two in 2023, but we may be able to bring folks along on our exploratory trip in fall 2022 as well, so if accessing normally-closed historic mining sites as the foreground subjects for sunset, Milky Way and star trails shots is your idea of fun, like it is for us, let us know and we can keep you posted if the access permission comes through. We’ve found that access changes frequently, so even if we’re allowed in one year, we never know if we’ll be able to return on the next year.

Expansion: Utah/Arizona, New Mexico/Colorado,

 

Bodie, Mono Lake, Tioga Pass Landscape & Night Photography

Our Bodie itinerary change from three to four nights was motivated by the impossibility of getting a diverse group up to speed with night photography and efficient with our very limited time in Bodie in a single night or weekend. Two nights of practice at Mono Lake and in Yosemite (Tioga Pass), where we already maintain annual workshop operating permits anyway, has turned out to be an optimal minimum practice period to get photographers both comfortable shooting at night and coordinated as a group to minimize shooting delays and stray light that can pollute foregrounds. And two nights in Bodie, adding the fourth night, doubles the precious nighttime in Bodie, increasing the subjects we can cover and the number of time-consuming panoramas we can produce.

To maximize image quality in dark sky locations like Bodie (and night photography in our other locations), we’ve revamped our capture technique to allow multiple exposures for noise reduction in sky-stacking software. We’re also testing and incorporating highly dimmable panel lights with adjustable white balance to cast a subtle light on ambient foregrounds.  We’re really pleased with the results of these changes.

For much of the past two years we were unable to book conference rooms for post-processing classroom sessions.  For 2022 we have reserved the centers so that we can offer post processing once again as part of the Bodie Night Photography experience. Post-processing is digital imaging’s darkroom, our “development and printing” adjustments, a big part of the production of an image. So our workshops with one night in Bodie include a demo/class/feedback session where you can edit along and save the settings as a preset for future sessions. Given extra shooting time in Bodie on our two-night itineraries, we also have more time for extra panoramas, star trails, time-lapse shooting, and the extra day gives us time for an extra postprocessing session to go over additional software and settings, tailored to the interests of the group.

For 2022 we still have August 25-28 (3 nights, more information). Like last year, in the fall we’ll offer an Eastern Sierra Fall Colors workshop that will also put us in Bodie for a sunrise and six hours of building access: October 10-14 (4 nights, more information). For 2023 we’re looking at June 7-11 (4 nights), June 14-17  (3 nights) and July 9-13 (4 nights). As a courtesy we often giv eour prior clients first shot at workshops when we open them, but contact us if you’d like to be among the first to secure a spot and we can put you on the waiting list.

Southern Oregon, Wyoming or Montana?

We’ve taken multiple workshop-scouting trips to UT/AZ/NM/CO, OR/WA, MT/WY, etc., revisiting many sites Jeff has shot before. We’re assessing logistical details such as access, permits and so on. We have a number of destinations in mind White Pocket, the Oregon Coast, Yellowstone/Grand Teton National Parks, Bisti Badlands… Working out the logistical details is a LOT of work, and expense, so help us prioritize and let us know which ones you’d like us to offer first!