Night Photography Workshop at Bodie State Historic Park, along with High Sierra and Mono Lake.

Capture the Milky Way in an authentic, abandoned Wild West ghost town – the historic mining town of Bodie, California. For our August and June 2025 four-night itineraries focused on dark sky night photography at Bodie State Historic Park, we will spend two nights enjoying special after-hours access from 6 pm to 1 am. Additionally, we will hold two post-processing and feedback sessions to guide you in coaxing the best results from the images you have captured. We also maintain permits for Yosemite National Park and Inyo National Forest, so the initial two days and nights before our time in Bodie will be spent practising landscape and night photography in the High Sierra, near Yosemite’s Tioga Pass, and the exotic ‘Tufa’ calcium carbonate rock formations at Mono Lake.

Many workshops will present a selection of beautiful images. Our value proposition is quite distinct; take a look at our sample images. Jeff’s albums on Flickr from Bodie, Mono Lake, and Tioga Pass comprise over 1,600 images! We aren’t trying to impress anyone with a small collection of fortunate moments. We don’t pass you off to junior instructors, those who don’t live near the sites they are guiding you through or who may not have taken the photographs you see in the workshop advertisements. We are the principals; we lead the workshops ourselves. We clearly understand our seasonal conditions and local weather well. We can show you locations and compositions that only locals are familiar with. With us, you know precisely what you are getting, and we take pride in the expertise, techniques, and local knowledge that we provide in all of our photography workshops!

We are offering various Bodie itineraries in 2025, including some primarily with night access and others that feature morning building interiors along with one night access. Browse our list of photography workshops and choose the one that best fits your photography goals.

Your local guides, Jeff Sullivan and Lori Hibbett, have lived less than an hour’s drive from Bodie Road since 2010, but they have each been exploring the Sierra Nevada and Eastern Sierra region since the 1970s. They are co-founders of the Great Basin School of Photography and have been leading photography workshops in Bodie, Yosemite National Park, the Eastern Sierra region, Nevada ghost towns, and Death Valley National Park since 2012. By 2025, they will have arranged and guided approximately 90 special access sessions in Bodie!

Jeff authored the book on landscape photography in California: ‘Photographing California Vol. 2 – South’ (320 pages, available on our website). He won the 2011 International Astronomy Photographer of the Year ‘People and Space’ special prize. He has been recognised as a Top 100 Travel Photographer in the World. As a dark sky advocate and passionate time-lapse astrophotographer, his blog is ranked among the Top 30 Astrophotography Blogs. He obtained a Computer Science degree from U.C. Berkeley and entered the digital imaging field at colour printer leader Tektronix in 1984. He has practised photography since taking a 35mm darkroom class in 1974 and has engaged in digital photography since 2001.

Lori first fell in love with photography when she was an instructor for wilderness survival expeditions in the Sierra Nevada, which she helped lead through UCLA Extension alongside survival expert Ron Hood for ten years. She has been named one of the top 100 female photographers and one of the best nature photographers in the world. Her work has appeared in Outdoor Photographer Magazine, Random House, and numerous other magazines, calendars, and publications. Additionally, she is a dark sky advocate; her images and time-lapse footage were featured in the announcement and media coverage of the State of Nevada’s ‘Dark Skies Bill’ SB52, which promotes the value and recognition of Nevada’s dark skies.