Bodie Night Photography Workshops

This is our Bodie workshop overview page. We have four small group Bodie night photography workshop itineraries for 2025. All include two practice nights in stunning places before our first night in Bodie (the minimum required for fellow workshop participants not to be trashing your foreground with their lights, and for everyone to be shooting efficiently so we can all capture more compositions in our limited time in Bodie). 

• 1 night in Bodie in a 3-night workshop
• 2 nights in Bodie in a 4-night workshop (two dates)
• 1 night and one morning/interior session in Bodie in a 4-night workshop (comingsoon)
• 1 night and one morning/interior session in Bodie plus fall colors and bristlecone pines in a 5-night workshop (coming soon)

We’re running a Black Friday sale to top these itineraries off with photographers! Use the discount code “blackfriday” after you select the number of photographers to enroll (that opens a discount box to enter the code). As the first workshops fill, we’ll release additional dates / itineraries. We fill our Bodie workshops, and the popular dates go fast. 

We feel that 8 photographers is the maximum for the spaces we’ll be shooting in, and that two guides/instructors, each with several dozen nights experience in Bodie (and hundreds of nights leading workshops), is best to keep a group with mixed experience and various cameras productive. All of our Bodie workshops are conducted with proper permits to enable us to shoot all of the best locations in the area. 

This will be our 14th season offering roughly 5 Bodie workshops per year, often with multiple nights in Bodie or morning interior access plus night. We’ve shot in Bodie in every month of the summer season multiple times. We live an hour north of Bodie Road; sometimes we visit 15 times per year. We’ve each encountered a lot more subjects and compositions in our ~80 special access sessions, in more conditions, than others with less experience in Bodie (and we compete to find new ones). I was asked this year about copyright… If you join us, you’re hiring us in part to lead you to compositions, so we wouldn’t think it appropriate for you to worry about potential copyright infringement of the concepts covered by our thousands of images from pasts visits (Bodie, Mono Lake, Yosemite, etc). We’re full time photography workshop guides and instructors, not moonlighting at this, so we’re very experienced at helping clients with all levels of photography and night photography experience. In Bodie. We’ll help you with optimized exposure techniques, lighting, and post-processing tools and techniques. And with so many nights experience in Bodie, we’ll move you through compositions efficiently, optimized to astrophotography opportunities available that week and time of night, and the conditions. 

These are honest representations of what you can capture. None of these results are faked. For ethical reasons we don’t substitute skies or fake reflections. You may do whatever modifications you choose, we just don’t want clients to feel tricked if they came and found out that the Milky Way was portrayed in impossible positions (which we’ve seen others do). We never create fake AI results (which plagiarize the original, actual creators’ hard work). We were informed by Inyo National Forest that none of the other operators running Bodie workshops had permits to shoot at Mono Lake South Tufa or other Inyo National Forest lands last year. After about a decade working with the USFS, we were granted a 5-year permit. Support serious, professional operators who would never risk their clients’ workshop (like getting shut down by their leader getting cited). Your success, your investment of travel and time, and your trust, is valuable to us. Many of our clients come back out with us again and agains