Yosemite Valley in Winter
A Digital Photography
Field Workshop

February 24-26, 2018
3 days $875
Enrollment limited to 10-12 people

There is one scholarship spot in this class.

Register online or call to enroll 650 355-7507.

The Place
Winter in Yosemite Valley is a transformed world. Trees are wet and dark, the oaks are bare. The cliffs are blanketed with snow. Weather moves through in waves of clouds and mist. Ponds and river edges are frozen. There is usually snow on the valley floor. Visitors are dramatically fewer in number. Our three days together will likely be cold, but we will no doubt be warmed by the special beauty that winter brings to this grand valley. Although we will carpool to various locations, I hope our basic mode of transportation through the valley will be our feet. There is really no other way to come to know a place.

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 the valley, 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 if weather permits.

Yosemite NPS Website
Yosemite Valley Map (pdf download)

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

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Stephen Johnson

Current projects include With a New Eye, his groundbreaking and historic all digital national parks project, a new book Stephen Johnson On Digital Photography for O'Reilly, ongoing portfolio development and extensive lecturing.

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 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.”