Capture the Milky Way in an authentic abandoned Wild West ghost town, the historic mining town of Bodie, California. We will spend two nights with special after hours access to Bodie 6pm – 1am, and we have two post-processing and feedback sessions to show you how to coax the best results out of the images you have captured. We also maintain permits for Yosemite National Park and Inyo National Forest, so the initial two days and nights prior to our nights in Bodie are spent practicing landscape photography and night photography in the High Sierra near Yosemite’s Tioga Pass, and in the exotic ‘Tufa’ calcium carbonate rock formations at Mono Lake.

Your local guides, Jeff Sullivan and Lori Hibbett, have lived less than an hour’s drive from Bodie Road since 2010, but they have been exploring the Sierra Nevada and Eastern Sierra regions since the 1970s. Co-founders of Great Basin School of Photography, they have been leading photography workshops in Bodie, Yosemite, the Eastern Sierra region, Nevada ghost towns and Death Valley for a dozen of years. By 2023 they will have arranged and guided approximately 80 special access sessions in Bodie!

Jeff wrote the book on landscape photography in California: ‘Photographing California Vol. 2 – South’ (320 pages, available on Amazon). He was the winner of the 2011 International Astronomy Photographer of the Year ‘People and Space’ special prize. He has been named a Top 100 Travel Photographer in the World. A dark sky advocate and avid time-lapse astrophotographer, his blog is ranked as a Top 30 Astrophotography Blog. He has been practicing photography since the 35mm darkroom class he took in 8th grade.

Lori first fell in love with photography when she was an instructor for wilderness survival expeditions in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which she helped lead through UCLA Extension with survival expert Ron Hood for ten years. Shooting all over the West alongside Jeff since 2010, she has been named one of the top 100 female photographers, one of the best nature photographers in the world, and has been published in numerous magazines, calendars and other publications. She also produces astrophotography time-lapse videos and is a dark sky advocate.

Many workshops will show you a handful of nice images. Our value proposition is very different; check out our sample images. Jeff’s albums on Flickr from Bodie, Mono Lake and Tioga Pass total over 1600 images! When we advertise a workshop, we try to show you only the exact relevant ones from that location and season. We aren’t trying to impress anyone with a small handful of lucky moments that may be from a different season. We don’t pawn you off on employee instructors, who may not have taken the photos you see. We are the principals; we lead the workshops. We obviously know local weather and conditions well. We can show you locations and compositions that only locals know.

With us you will know exactly what you are getting, and we are proud of the expertise, techniques and local knowledge that we offer in all of our photography workshops!