Great Basin School of Photography

The year started our innocuously enough, with a quick trip to Death Valley (below) to enjoy water on the Badwater Salt Flats, and another trip in February that yielded nice light on the Mesquite Flat sand dunes. Eastern Sierra fall colors in October (above) had some smoke interference from the Creek Fire at times, but excellent conditions other times.

The pandemic affected many cleints’ travel to our March Death Valley and Nevada trip, but we were able to complete that itinerary and get back out locally in Nevada a few times in the spring (below).

We were able to get a hiking permit to The Wave in September!

A couple of times we had to go out and see if massive fires were heading towards our house (slink Fire below).

We managed to get out to our favorite local park Bodie a few times, and we continued to experiment with different subjects and shooting postions.

One thing I wanted to do was ensure that I shot enough portrait orientation images, and leave enough room in the compositions, to have some cover-worthy results. I actually like them as some of my favorites of the year.

We’ll see if anyone picks those up, but meanwhile one of my favorite commercial uses was two images for the 2021 Mono Lake Committee calendar just released (only $13.50!), including the cover, captured during an early November seminar we led for them in late 2019:

Last but not least, conditions were perfect to shoot the Geminid meteor shower this year, and the peak night December 13/14 was some of the highest meteor activity we’ve seen.

Can’t wait to finish the meteor composites and time-lapse videos. Here’s a short preview clip that you can watch full screen on Flickr:

Meanwhile over on Instagram, an auto-generated selection of my most-liked images uploaded yields this:

I don’t consistently select the same 9 myself, so a 4×4 matrix of 16 favorites seems like a better representation to me:

Maybe I should prioritize returning to places/regions that seem to give me more images that I like. What about night photography subjects and locations? Let’s see…

How about black and white? Am I doing enough of them? Which subjects/locations work best?

How are mobile phones doing? Should I use one more? Here are some samples from the iPhone 11 & 12:.

Overall 2020 was an extremely difficult year, with Covid affecting March, April, May, June, November, December, smoke from wildfires problematic in late August, September, even parts of October. That gave me time to revisit or finally post-process may images from past years. I placed many of those new old images at the end of my 2020 Favorites album on my Flickr account. We were home so much, I should really do a post with my favorite fresh edits produced in 2020, both new images and old.

Financially we were able to bridge large revenue gaps with a 30-year EIDL loan, but its term lasts 20 years past a normal retirement age and 10 years past my life expectancy! We’ll need to have really high bookings and run lots of full workshops as soon as Covid subsides to pay off debt before we retire, and hopefully have a little extra for retirement. With January 2021 now gone and February potentially impacted, we’ll probably need to take on more debt before we chip away at any. It’s a good thing that we love what we do! Needless to say, we’ll be extra excited if you can join us this year. We’ll be expanding opportunities on our 2021 Workshop Calendar on our Web site shortly. Drop us a line if you’d like us to notify you as new workshops are released.