Alaska
A Digital Photography Field Workshop

early August 2013
12 days $5500-$6500

includes lodging, transportation within Alaska (including airfare to Katmai) and extensive photographic instruction.

Email if interested

America's Natural Wonderland

Join us on a 12 day photographic excursion to three of Alaska's wonderlands, Kenai Fjords, Katmai and Denali National Parks travelled by train and plane, explored with photographer Stephen Johnson.

The Parks

Katmai National Park and Preserve
air transportation and lodging at Brooks Camp included

Katmai National Park and Preserve encompasses 4.7 million acres of pristine wilderness on the Alaska Peninsula, across from Kodiak Island in Southwestern Alaska. Wild rivers and streams, rugged coastlines, broad green glacial hewn valleys, active glaciers, volcanoes and brown bears characterize Katmai. Katmai contains Alagnak Wild River; Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, a 30-square-mile volcanic caldera; and a very large population of brown bears.

Katmai National Park and Preserve is an area rich with history and wildlife. It is the site of the Brooks River National Historic Landmark, with North America's highest concentration of prehistoric human dwellings. The park is also home to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, the result of a volcanic eruption in 1912 which buried more than 40-square-miles of wilderness under as much as 700 feet of ash. The name was derived from the thousands of small holes and cracks in the ash deposits that gave off gas and steam from heated ground water. Fourteen active volcanoes lie within the park today and the Alaska Volcano Observatory operates 19 monitoring stations there.

Katmai NPS website
Katmai Map
Brooks Lodge

Kenai Fjords National Park
lodging and all day boat tour included

Kenai Fjords National Park is comprised of 669,983 acres on the southeast coast of the Kenai Peninsula, near the town of Seward in Southcentral Alaska. Kenai Fjords includes three main areas - Exit Glacier, Harding Icefield and the coast. Exit Glacier, a half-mile wide river of ice, is the easiest section of the park to access. The 700-square-mile Harding Icefield is one of only four remaining icefields in the U.S. It is also the largest icefield entirely within U.S. borders. The park's rugged coastline includes beautiful tidewater glaciers and abundant marine wildlife.

Snow and ice cover 60 percent of the park. As the ice recedes, it uncovers glacially carved valleys that fill with seawater to form the stunning fjords. House-sized ice masses crash from tidewater glaciers into the sea. Glacier and wildlife cruises are a popular way to experience the tidewater glaciers within the park. Seward, located on Resurrection Bay, is one of Alaska's most popular towns for scenery, wildlife and fishing. With a nice selection of restaurants and lodging, visitors can choose from a wide variety of options.

Kenai Fjords NPS Website
Kenai Fjords Map
Kenai Fjords Northwestern Fjord Cruise

The Workshop
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. Fieldwork with intensive presentations and assistance will fill our days. We will photograph in some of the most spectacular places in the world, see a huge variety of wildlife and work on our photography, opening files, review successes and challenges of the photographs made during the day, constantly going back in the field putting into practice lessons learned.

The advent of the digital age of photography provides unique opportunities for field photography instruction. We will be reviewing work on camera screens as it is made and on portable computers, examining exposure, composition and emotional impact. Group evening reviews will also be conducted using digital projection. High resolution printers will be available to put some images to the ultimate test.

Digital exposure and dynamic range, color management, printers, papers and pigments, b&w and color, composition, emotion and amazement-all will be part of our ambitious 12-day excursion to Alaska and into the evolving world of digital photography.

To Register
Registration fee must be paid in full to secure a spot in the class. Additional information will be sent upon registration.

Credit Card Registration by phone 650 355-7507

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.

He was named to the Photoshop Hall of Fame in 2003. 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 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.”