New 2026 Photography Workshops Released!

Our calendar for a new year is set in place as we finalize photography workshop dates and itineraries for the second half of the year in the prior November. That’s the soonest that we can get our summer dates for our Bodie workshops in the coming year. 

For the rest of our schedule, we like to see and photograph new places as much as the rest of you. And we like to repeat trips where we add a lot of value, to places that we know particularly well, and we’re really, really good at leading workshops in. So we both scout new places to increase our experience and knowledge, and we release workshops where we can share our knowledge. With our 2026 photography workshop schedule we’ve released the broadest selection of itineraries that we’ve ever had for 2026, including the widest variety of Bodie itineraries that we’ve had in years.

We’ve caught the aurora borealis in the areas where we lead workshops several times in the last couple of years. The two years after a solar cycle peak are particularly well suited to delivering strong aurorae, so the next two years should bring more great  opportunities in mid-latitude locations. We’ll be watching for them, and we can help you capture them!

We’ve released a High Sierra landscapes and night photography trip in August with dark skies to enjoy both the Milky Way and the Perseid Meteor shower, supported by a pack station. They’ll handle the hard work: we’ll ride horses in, they’ll supply camping gear, bring our gear in, and cook the meals. OK, we might have to set up our own tents, but they’ll do the heavy lifting. All we have to do is relax. Take a brisk swim. Go catch a fish. Go on a day hike. Relax. Catch a fish or two. Do some stargazing. We’ll have some short-ish rides to new basins and lakes to keep things interesting, and some layover days to settle in to the relaxing surroundings.

Some of our workshops fill fast. We decided to run an Oregon Coast workshop, limited in attendance by the six rooms in the lighthouse keeper’s quarters we’ll stay in on the first night. When we ran the concept by a few folks, the workshop filled before we could announce it. Let us know if you want to be on the waiting list for our next one. If we’re going to schedule the lighthouse stay again with exclusive access to the grounds at night (and seven course breakfast the next morning), it’s best to have the group identified up front to fill the lodging and have exclusive use of the facility before we pull the trigger. 

Immediately after the Oregon Coast workshop we’ll head down the coast to the Redwood National Park area to shoot the California North Coast and the annual rhododendron bloom in the redwood forests. If we’re lucky there can be fog rolling into the redwoods, and we can catch sun rays streaming through the trees as the fog burns off. A 3-night itinerary, this is one of our lest expensive workshops at only $995. 

Another new itinerary comes from our own explorations of our home state, Nevada. Patterned after our “adventure series” Death Valley trips to remote areas, we’ll show you some of our favorite remote landscapes in Nevada. Of course we’ll do it in the late spring when temperatures are reasonable, when night skies are dark, and when we might find some wildflowers. We’ll start near Las Vegas so people flying in can rent a Jeep or similarly suitable vehicle for unpaved roads which might require high clearance at times. We have multiple sites in mind for destinations but we’ll finalize the route closer to the workshop date when we know how wildflowers are doing (their timing is different down by Las Vegas and up in Central Nevada). And wouldn’t you know it, the timing works out perfectly for shooting the Milky Way and the peak night of the Lyrid meteor shower. Good thing we’ll be in remote places where we can leave cameras out at night.

Of course we’ll have new takes on old favorites. Our Bodie State Historic Park itineraries include a four-night itinerary with two nights in Bodie, a four-night itinerary with one night in Bodie and a morning session with access to building interiors, and a three-night weekend itinerary that starts with our night photography weekend boot camp, then ends with an optional third night in Bodie. Bodie took the best weekends for their own events this year, so we have half as many 2-nights in Bodie.

Our Night Photography Boot Camp goes through our best practices for dark sky night photography, and it can be taken as a stand-alone night training weekend for only $695! Photographers who take that training can also choose to stay and join us for an additional night on Sunday to shoot with us in Bodie. This three-night format with one in Bodie is $1595, the cheapest way we’ve offered to get into Bodie in years (it’s not cheap to run Bodie workshops, we may not offer the 3-night format again). In recent years we’ve been the only operator running Bodie workshops also legally permitted to bring workshop clients to Mono Lake.

Even many of our “regular” workshops that we run every year (because they rock) have some “icing on the cake” in 2026. Both of our March 2026 Death Valley National Park itineraries look like they’re getting set up well with fall rains to result in a strong wildflower bloom. There was a “super bloom” in 2025 and 2016, 2026 would be consistent with a 10-11 year cycle. The Pacific is extra warm at the moment, which gives us a greater likelihood of “atmospheric river” rain events strong enough to water the plants which germinated after the recent September and November rains. While the new moon timing works for Milky Way photography at the Racetrack and other remote locations on the adventure backcountry trip later in the month, the earlier spring landscape photography session benefits from the full moon and a total lunar eclipse. Then there’s the Death Valley Winter Light session in December, when we’ll have low angle sunlight as the sun never gets above 31 degrees high, and we’ll enjoy moonless dark sky conditions for most of the peak night of the Geminid meteor shower, from 8pm on.

In Yosemite National Park we’re timing our fall colors workshop in late October to coincide with a sunset moon rise by Half Dome. It looks like we’ll have the best placement of the moon for this since we caught our best compositions in October 2011. The iconic elm in Cook’s Meadow usually peaks in late October, and the dogwoods and bigleaf maples should be colorful. We’ve reserved dates on our calendar in case a small group wants to hire us for a spring workshop in late April into May with peak waterfalls and moonbows. It’s crowded that time of year, so a workshop only works if we can fit into one vehicle. We can rent a large SUV or van for a moderate group like a photography club, but we run our workshops with thin margins and don’t want to risk having to load vehicle costs onto a smaller group, so we’ll launch the workshop if/when we have the group identified and have clarity on costs to set the price. Our Yosemite winter workshop with Horsetail Fall in February could be extra interesting this year if we do get an atmospheric river storm event to blanket Yosemite Valley with snow, or to send a storm by us when we can catch the day after with evaporating moisture causing fog and mist swirling around the valley and up the face of El Capitan (we’ve enjoyed those conditions in Yosemite in fall and spring too).

We like to stack the odds of enjoying unique compositions and stunning seasonal conditions on our trips, and for both it looks like we’re set up for one of our best photo workshop seasons ever in 2026. We have good odds of strong wildflowers for the two Death Valley workshops in March, the Nevada backcountry trip in late mid April, and the Yosemite spring trip at the end of April into May. The two strongest meteor showers of the year have dark skies for the peak nights and hours. We usually save the Perseid meteor shower for ourselves in the rare years when it’s particularly good because the best places to shoot it for hours are remote, camping far from headlights and headlamps. Our August High Sierra horse-packing trip gives us the perfect opportunity to be in such a place without needing high clearance vehicles, so this year we’d like to share the Perseids with you. Our annual winter light trip in Death Valley in December will offer good conditions to shoot the Geminid meteor shower in both 2025 and 2026, and an “International Dark Sky Park” that big (and warm) is a perfect place to find an out-of-the-way place to leave cameras running. We have full moons to place in sunrise and/or sunset landscape compositions in our early March Death Valley spring trip with a bonus total lunar eclipse, for our Yosemite spring trip (when the full moon creates night “moonbows”), and for Yosemite fall colors, when we’ll enjoy unusually tight compositions with Half Dome.

The best part may be that we try to stack all of our annual spending, for access reservations, for some lodging, for hardware and software purchases, website hosting renewal, and advertising, all in the same time frame as the release of our workshops. So we like to have a rush of new orders to cover the rush of expenses. So we offer our best and often only discounts of the year around Black Friday. We offer prices below what we could sustainably offer year ’round, to handle the need for cash flow.

So head over to our workshop overview page on our website and see what screamin’ deals you can score!