Every once in a while we offer both Bodie sunrise/interior access session and a Bodie night photography session in one workshop. In 2025, we’ll again offer two itineraries like this, one in spring conditions and a longer one in fall!
This workshop will start with two days/nights in the Mono Basin to Yosemite High Sierra area pursuing landscape photography and dark sky night photography. As locals with decades of experience in the area, we can take you to prolific wildflowers, exotic tufa rock formations at Mono Lake, twisted juniper trees, star-reflecting ponds and glacier-polished granite. There should be prolific wildflowers in the Mono Basin: one valley in particular can be yellow with arrowleaf balsamroot (which looks like mules ears). In some years other areas nearby can also have prolific lupine. In some years there’s a late spring snowfall around Memorial Day, which could put a white cap on the Sierra Nevada as seen in reflections from Mono Lake.
By practicing Milky Way photography, Milky Way panoramas, and Milky Way reflections before we have our precious time in Bodie at night, everyone will be able to be more proficient and successful in Bodie. We will practice various efficient exposure techniques, lighting, and post processing techniques. Post-processing sessions will be held during the middle part of the day when light isn’t best for photography.
Our fourth day will find us greeting our monitor at the Bodie gate at 6 am where we’ll receive our instructions and then be escorted into town where several buildings will be opened for us to go inside and photograph historic shops, hotels, bars, antiques, and mining buildings and artifacts. We will have access to the buildings until noon. You’ll have three hours to photograph golden hour until 9, when the park opens to visitors, but we’ll have exclusive interior access. We’ll wrap up and then grab lunch and take a break, reconvening for dinner and our 6pm – 1am night session.
Lori and I like early season compositions with the rising Milky Way, to enable tight compositions at a less wide focal length, with the galactic center larger on the horizon. The 9:44pm galactic center rise time is actually centered on a zero-degree horizon, so the best Milky Way compositions will start 30-45 minutes later as most of the galactic center clears the effective horizon. Timing the various opportunities is critical this early in the summer Milky Way season.
There will be a 32% crescent moon in the sky during our night session in Bodie, setting at 12:45am as we’re getting ready to exit (it’ll effectively set behind the Bodie Hills around 12:20). Anything over 25% for a crescent moon can make the sky have a slight sky-blue tint, but 32% shouldn’t be so much that it wipes out the Milky Way (like a full moon). The moon should be far enough toward setting at night that it doesn’t intrude into our Milky Way shots, but it will provide foreground illumination for more subject/shadow detail, and less noisy night shots. Normally in May the best night shots would be after it’s fully dark (10:06 pm on that night). The moon illumination should make night-equivalent sky brightness somewhat earlier, when twilight matches the moon illumination, probably about 15-20 minutes earlier into twilight. So we’ll set up early and start shooting our night shots a little earlier than astronomical twilight. The prior nights will have slimmer crescent moons setting earlier in the night, so those will have normal dark sky night photography conditions.
Late May can offer scattered rain showers during the afternoon, a colorful sunset and potentially rainbows as the storms clears, followed by clear skies for Milky Way photography under a dark night sky. If we’re lucky with a decent snowpack, a late thaw of the snowpack (or afternoon rain showers) can create reflecting ponds in Bodie.
Weather and photographic opportunities will influence our daily itineraries. You will have two trip leaders, each with 65+ nights experience shooting and leading groups in Bodie (plus roughly 20 interior access sessions), 200+ days leading photographers in the Eastern Sierra. Based on our experience, we prefer our workshops to have no more than 8 participants for a 4:1 student to instructor ratio, to give you maximum attention and more time inside Bodie’s buildings. Each building has a limit of 1-5 photographers inside, so we always request two monitors for our interiors sessions, so you can spend a lot more time inside buildings, not waiting outside in line. We’ve heard about workshops with 15-20 people and only one monitor, one building open!
A portion of the proceeds of your fee goes to the Bodie Foundation to assist in their “arrested decay” program in preserving the park. Please note that in Bodie we’ll spend a few hours standing and walking at an elevation of 8374 feet. Consult your doctor if you have any concerns.
Here are links to sample real photos (no faked sky substitutions, no AI) from Bodie and vicinity workshops in May-June. See a sample itinerary below.
