2026 Bodie Night Photography Workshops

We live here, a short drive from Bodie Road. 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 the time of night, and the conditions. 

Lori and I are the local experts: of the nearly 12,000 images that Jeff shares on Flickr, over 2000 are from Mono County and another 1000+ are from Yosemite. While leading workshops we draw from our superior knowledge of how the local weather and light will unfold, and we draw from a superior inventory of subjects and locations that we know in order to set you up for the best shots. we’re not aware of anyone else who has 1200+ Bodie photos documenting many years of running Bodie special access sessions from May through November, day and night, with every imaginable combination of weather and light. As avid local astrophotographers, we know when to pursue aurora borealis shots. During Our May-June 2025 workshop we captured it on three nights at Mono Lake and in Bodie. We’ve captured multiple comets over Bodie, lightning, iridescent clouds, the International Space Station… if there’s something unique to shoot, we’ll set you up for it! We’ve had out images featured on the cover of the annual Bodie Foundation calendar and the Mono Lake Committee calendar. One of Jeff’s photos appears in the California State Parks brochure sold at Mono Lake South Tufa. The Mono Lake Committee bookstore in Lee Vining sells his 320-page guidebook “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South“, which includes four chapters on the Eastern Sierra and Yosemite. Inyo National Forest just purchased a 60” print of a Milky Way arch (with green airglow and red aurora borealis at the northern end) over Mono Lake tufa, to hang at their visitor center at Mono Lake. See more on our About Us page.

Our photos 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, including Milky Way reflections. You may do whatever modifications you choose, we just don’t want clients to feel fooled/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 images (which plagiarize the original, actual creators’ hard work, using data centers driving up residential electricity rates). 

I was recently asked by a client about copyright… if you join us, you’re hiring us in part to lead you to compositions we copyrighted in our thousands of images from pasts visits (Bodie, Mono Lake, Yosemite, etc). So no problem. It’s an interesting question though. How do others find unique compositions that don’t mimic our prior copyrighted work, including the work of our prior workshop participants? If they’re operating without required permits, or if they don’t hesitate to show obviously faked results in order to (fool and) obtain customers, are they also shamelessly ripping off our work? We love to support local nonprofits and we’ve raised somewhere in the vicinity of $200,000 dollars for the Bodie Foundation’s building stabilization efforts. That plus our other operating expenses illustrates what’s at stake, the sizeable investment we’ve made to secure special access to be able to produce our unique images. Not to mention years of invested time. Unscrupulous operators are not a small issue.