Death Valley winter light and Geminid meteor shower photography workshop!

Death Valley Winter Light Photography Workshop with Geminid Meteor Shower 2026

December 9-14, 2026 (releasing November 2025)

The listing for our upcoming December 2025 Death Valley Winter Light workshop appears here: www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/black-and-white-photography-workshop/

After decades of exploring Death Valley, I’ve come to the conclusion that winter is overall the best season to visit Death Valley for photography, as I describe here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” In recent years visiting during this time, we’ve enjoyed stunning weather and conditions for landscape photography, low crowds for untracked landscapes, sometimes Badwater flooded for weeks, low angle sunlight to enhance foreground textures, moderate temperatures, and low off-season lodging rates. It’s amazing to be in a major national park in a peak photography season, while being able to dial the clock back decades on the crowds!

We’ll likely have snow-capped mountains in many compositions, and we may be able to visit Joshua trees in the snow. Winter light is a particularly good time for black and white photography. We’ll host multiple post-processing sessions to cover color landscape photography, high quality black and white conversions, and dark sky night/meteor shower photography.

The peak night of the Geminid meteor shower will have a moonlit foreground early on, then the meteors will shine against a dark sky background from roughly 9pm – 5:20am. It’s fully dark by shortly after 6pm, so we’ll have nearly 3 hours to capture meteors over the moderately lit landscape before having another 8 hours of dark skies to potentially capture 100+ of the brightest meteors (I included 127 meteors in my composite for the peak night in 2023). For 2026 we’ll build upon our experience shooting dozens of meteor showers since 2009. 2026 offers some of the best dark sky conditions for shooting the Geminid meteor shower, the most active meteor shower of the year, since 2023 and 2020.

If we’re lucky, airglow has often been stunning in many of our recent night shots. Hopefully we’ll get a little aurora-green airglow, possible some red. We even captured aurora borealis multiple times in 2023, 2024 and 2025 nearby in California and Nevada, and in May and August 2024 some of the best aurora borealis events in 20 years were visible down to Death Valley! We monitor space weather for any opportunities that may arise during the workshop.

In 2023 we even had extensive wildflowers in Panamint Valley in December from a heavy monsoon rain in August. In 2013 another valley in Death Valley National Park had wildflowers in November. We track late summer and fall storms to anticipate when and where wildflowers will occur, and we’ll watch to see if the September 2025 heavy rain that closed many backcountry roads throughout the park could give us some pockets of early winter wildflowers.

See why we like returning to Death Valley in winter again and again:
Sample Death Valley winter light images.

Jeff’s main Death Valley album displays nearly 2000 images! Exploring Death Valley is a passion for us, and we love sharing our favorite sites, compositions, and knowledge of the seasonal conditions, weather and light with you.

Enrollment is limited to 8, secure a space while one is still available!

What’s included:

Guiding, based on our 70+ trips exploring the Park
Constant fine tuning of itinerary based on forecasts & conditions
Photography instruction, composition consultation if desired
Post-processing sessions for color and black and white photography

What’s not included:

Lodging – camping to luxury, your choice! (discounts may be available; lodging recommendations will be provided upon registration)
Transportation – carpooling optional (no super-spreader vehicle!)
Meals/snacks/beverages (outdoor dining or take-out, as available)
Entrance fee to the park ($15/week)
Onerous group lodging terms (high price, poor cancellation terms, etc.)

Sample Itinerary

To ensure you get the best pictures and to accommodate for weather, we keep the exact itinerary flexible. This is an example of what to expect, though it may change slightly as necessary during the workshop.

December 9 — Travel. Meet in the afternoon at Furnace Creek Resort. We’ll photograph sunset, possibly blue hour, then head in for dinner. We may opt to go out and get a few night shots before retiring to our hotel rooms for the evening.
December 10, 11, 12 — We’ll meet for sunrise, and make a few photography stops on our way to breakfast. We’ll grab a quick bite and then head back out for more photography. The sun barely gets over 32 degrees high this time of year, so the light will be good for much of the day. We’ll break for lunch and dinner as needed, possibly away from Furnace Creek if we’re off on an extended outing for the day. It gets dark early in December, so in the evenings we can practice night photography or conduct post-processing demos.
December 13 – A full day in the field, possibly off in a particularly interesting area of the park. Upon our return we can have another post-processing session. After dinner, set up for shooting the Geminid meteor shower.
December 13 – Meet for another sunrise, grab breakfast, pack, check out and make our way homeward.
If you have the time, our 320-page photographers’ guidebook “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South” can give you more locations to shoot on your trip, in Death Valley or the southern Eastern Sierra.

Everyone can show you a few photos from Death Valley National Park, here are 1700+ of mine! (No substituted day or night skies, real night sky and reflections, never faked.)