Death Valley Photography Workshops

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.