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Death Valley Photography Workshops

Death Valley landscape photography workshops with Jeff Sullivan.

Death Valley Spring and Night Photography Workshop
March 4-9, 2024
$1495
We’ll explore Death Valley’s sand dunes, salt flats, eroded badlands, and spectacular vistas. It also has sites with a rich history of gold, talc and borax mining. We like this timing to shoot the Park, before the worst of the oncoming heat. We also timed this to be close to the new moon date, so we will be able to shoot pre-dawn Milky Way in this “International Dark Sky Park” as well. While a “super bloom” is uncommon, we usually find a few decent patches of wildflowers. The timing peaked in late February into early March in 2016, and Death Valley received 1.5-2.5 more inches of rain February 4-7, so we should have good timing in early to mid March if the current El Nino delivers us another super bloom year. We watch rains in the fall and where plants are growing in December and January, so we have a head start on where to look when we return. Click here for more details and registration.

Death Valley Adventure Photography Workshop (Racetrack, etc)
March 10-15, 2024
$1495
When I was researching my “Photographing California” guidebook, I wanted to cover Death Valley thoroughly. We explored a number of remote roads, valleys and ridges, and found some unique and compelling sites that few get to see. We’ll show you The Racetrack and the tallest dunes on the West Coast (nearly 700 feet high), when we can also capture Milky Way, but you’ll need to camp and we’ll all need high clearance and All Terrain rated tires are recommended. No 4WD vehicle? No problem! We won’t need 4WD, just high clearance, but it you want to not subject your vehicle to five days of unpaved road (including Racetrack Road), Jeep rentals are available. Here are some photos from the terrain we’ll cover. We prefer to keep this group small. Click here for more details and registration. 

Death Valley Winter Light
December 9-14, 2024
$TBD, contact us!
Outside of a rare spring wildflower “super bloom,” low angle winter light is one of the best conditions to shoot Death Valley in, as described here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” In recent years visiting during this time, we’ve enjoyed stunning weather and conditions, no crowds for untracked landscapes, and low 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! For the 2023 workshop we enjoyed flooding on Badwater Salt Flats and extensive wildflowers in Panamint Valley! In December 2019 the water in Badwater lasted 5 weeks, in 2023-24 it has lasted 6 months already, with no end in sight!
More information here.  Sample images here.
Contact us to be notified when this workshop releases.

Death Valley Winter Light w/Black and White
January 3-8, 2025
TBD, contact us!
Outside of a rare spring wildflower “super bloom,” low angle winter light is probably the most attractive thing to go to Death Valley for, as described here: “The Advantages of Winter Light.” This session will be similar to the December Winter Light workshop, but with more emphasis on black and white photography, utilizing lines, shapes, textures, tones and light to emphasize subjects in strong compositions. As a bonus, it there’s late fall/early winter rain, the winter months offer the best conditions for standing water to remain on Badwater Salt Flats: cooler temperatures, low wind, and a saturated water table below. In December 2019 the water in Badwater lasted 5 weeks, in 2023-24 it has lasted 6 months already, with no end in sight!
More information here Sample images here.
Contact us to be notified when this workshop releases.

We hope that you can join us for one of our Death Valley National Park landscape photography workshops in 2024!

You may know that Jeff and  Lori traveled from 2010-2014 researching and writing the 320-page guidebook “Photographing California Vol. 2 – South“.  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+ site 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.

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 instruction and feedback  if you like. We monitor real time weather forecasts including wind and storm track predictions, sunrise and sunset forecasts, and we do meticulous planning around astronomical events.

We personally lead all of our workshops. We don’t want to waste our 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: wildflowers, Milky Way, meteor showers, and so on.

With about 60 visits to the Park in the last dozen years alone, we have the experience to make great decisions on when to ditch our expected 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 we 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 an itinerary. We’re going to try to optimize opportunities for landscape photography during every minute of every day.

During Covid we’ve run super 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 into 2024. Carpooling is entirely optional (we won’t pack everyone into a superspreader vehicle), meals will be in large, ariry rooms or take-out / outdoors whenever practical. We do what we can to give everyone peace of mind.