March 10-12, 2012
3 days $975
Enrollment limited to 12 people

There is one scholarship spot in this class.

Call to enroll 650 355-7507

Previous Workshop Testimonial:
" I learned more in those two and half days at Pt. Lobos about digital photography than I have in a lifetime!  Just understanding how to use the gray balance card to get white balance right alone was worth all of it!!  Thanks, Steve.  Even though I live quite close to Pt. Lobos and have visited the park so many times over the years, you gave me a perspective of the beauty of this great place that I had never seen before.  And just that one shot of the curious seal made my trip.  Steve is a great teacher, artist and wizard!"
-Jagi Shahani

The Place

Joshua Tree is high desert, exotic flora, desert vistas and wonderful boulder-strewn fields and hills. This workshop is about desert color, organic form and exploration. It is about quiet, and wind, sun, dawn and twilight, star-filled nights and solid photographic information.

The Joshua Tree Photography Workshop

This workshop will spend three days in this winter quiet, moving through this desert unhurried, looking around at simple form as much as at dramatic granite boulders and Joshua Trees themselves. The light and color being as much our subject as the land itself. We will work hard during the day, then review our work through digital projection at night.

We will spend our first half day preparing for our outings. Topics covered will be optimal digital camera use in a variety of formats, file size and printing considerations. We will open files, review success, and constantly go back in the field putting into practice lessons learned.

The advent of the digital age of photography provides unique opportunities for field photography instruction, reviewing work on camera screens as it is made, examining exposure, composition and emotional impact. Group evening reviews will also be conducted using digital projection.

We'll spend three activity packed days in this desert, sometimes rising before dawn and lingering for the last moment of twilight.

The trip is designed to be a complete immersion in landscape photography and its digital evolution. We will discuss technical and aesthetic issues, tapping into your emotional response to this landscape, working toward images that are uniquely your own.

Individual problem solving is a high priority in my workshop program. Classes are kept small to maximize individual attention. Plan to bring some of your work to give me an idea of how you see, what you are happy with, and photographs that indicate problems you are encountering.

Details


A full agenda is planned for this workshop, including dawn and dusk sessions. We will be doing a fair amount of walking.

Joshua Tree NPS Website
Joshua Tree Map (interactive)
Joshua Tree Map (pdf download)

Lodging is not included but a group discount has been arranged for at our motel headquarters in Twenty Nine Palms. Details will be sent on enrollment.

Stephen Johnson

Current projects include With a New Eye, his groundbreaking and historic all digital national parks project, the acclaimed 2006 book Stephen Johnson On Digital Photography, new work Exquisite Earth and ongoing portfolio development and extensive lecturing.

Stephen's pioneering work in digital photography has included software and product development for clients such as Apple, Adobe, Epson, Kodak, Hewlett Packard, Leaf, Ricoh and SuperMac. His work with Adobe includes the creation of the duotone curves shipped with their Photoshop software.

His photographic clients have included the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Friends of Photography. Johnson's photographs have been widely published and collected internationally.

In 1999, Folio Magazine declared the publication of Johnson's digital photographs in Life Magazine to be one of the Top 15 Critical Events in magazine publishing in the twentieth century. Stephen Johnson was named as a 2003 inductee into the Photoshop Hall of Fame, recognized for his achievements in Art. Canon named Steve as one of their Explorers of Light in 2006. In 2007 X-Rite named Stephen as a founding member of their exclusive Coloratti group of photographers and educators honored for their skills in color management.

In 1997, Life Magazine described Stephen Johnson as an artist that "...applies science to nature and creates art." His images create "...an intimacy that brings subject and viewer close in ways conventional photographs cannot." 

The Photographer’s Gallery wrote in 1998: “Stephen Johnson's photography rides on the "bleeding edge" of photography's transition to a digital media. Schooled in the traditions of fine-art western landscape photography, Johnson has taken his understanding of traditional photographic processes and brought those skills to bear on the emerging technologies and aesthetics of digital photography. He has pushed technology companies to rise to the best of what imagemaking can be, and pushed his own vision of how we see and record light in the natural world. This has led him to conclude that the way we have traditionally captured images with silver-based photography has been a poor and distortive view of the real and rich world before our eyes. His photographs look almost "unphotographic" in their clarity and purity of color. He shows us a world we know, but rarely see on paper. His is a truly remarkable vision.”