The Trip

Experience our four-day trek through Death Valley in Winter. The trip was designed to be a complete immersion in landscape photography and its digital evolution with the pioneer in digital landscape photography.

This digital landscape workshop explored this national park with the new tools of digital photography, including on-site visualization, and technical evaluation. Lectures will include digital exposure, composition, visual distillation, archiving, color management and fine-art printing. We discussed technical and aesthetic issues, tapping into participants emotional response to this landscape, working toward images that are uniquely their own. The emphasis was on improving the composition and technical finesse of the participants, empowering the individual photographers to better pursue their vision, from image-making to print-making. We held group and individual critique sessions, using a digital projector and workstations to display selections of the day's work.

Participant Galleries Alan Beymer Alan Gardner Don Holtaway Hy Murveit Mitch Weintraub Nick Kiest Michelle Perazzo Steve Somers Rich Edwards William Cheuh

Workshop Experiences

In my 29+ years of teaching at Merced College I have taken numerous photo workshops and this one rates in my top 3 of all time, thanks.

-Alan Beymer

I wanted to thank all of you for a great workshop. I will highly recommend your workshops to my friends, (of course, I already have been recommending them after the printing workshop last year) and really appreciate all your efforts above and beyond the call of duty!

-Hy Murveit

The Magical Digital Bus

We employed a specially-built digitally equipped eBus operated and sponsored by The Community College Foundation. This eBus is a 10 workstation digital classroom, complete with Macintosh PowerBook G4 17" computers, Apple HD 23 LCD displays, Epson and Hewlett-Packard inkjet printers and paper, and digital projection for our critiques and lectures. A satellite internet connection provided continuous access to email, websites relevant to our fieldwork, and alowed daily opportunities to post images from the workshop onto this website we built. Sharing workshop experiences in a variety of media was encouraged.

This unique field photography workshop capability gave us a freedom to make our photographs, inspect and archive them, critique, print and publish the images, all from the field. Digital cameras from Foveon and BetterLight were available to borrow during the workshop. It turned out be an unparalleled experience.

The Workshop Program

Individual problem solving has been a high priority in this workshop program all through its 25 year history. Classes are kept small to maximize individual attention. Students bring some of their work to demonstrate how they see, what they are happy with, and photographs that indicate problems they are encountering.

Details

A full agenda was undertaken for this workshop, including dawn and dusk sessions. We have been doing a fair amount of walking in the canyons and on the dunes.