Upcoming Workshops

Hi everyone! I've got a good amount of workshops coming up in late 2011 and in 2012, and I'd love for you to join me, both out in the field and in the classroom. Here's what I have coming up:

Photography & Photoshop: A Creative Fusion
December 7-11, 2011 
Los Osos, CA (between Los Angeles and San Francisco)

Learn to think about Photoshop while in the field shooting so that you capture the essential raw material for optimal digital enhancement. In the process, you'll push your photography way beyond what is possible "in camera" to produce fine art imagery that takes full advantage of a purely digital workflow. This is a very creative workshop that will leave you with a new arsenal of digital techniques.

Click here for more info

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Death Valley
February 16-19, 2012

Death Valley is not a hospitable place. In fact, it's one of the harshest places on Earth. But it's also a great place to take incredible photographs. One of the locations we will shoot is Badwater. At 282 feet below sea level, it's the lowest point in North America. At twilight, the images captured here seem like they are from another world.

Zabriskie Point, the Golden Canyons and the mud flats of the "Race Track," with it's moving stones, will give you the opportunity for some fascinating images that can't be taken anywhere else in the world.

The sand dunes in the heart of the Valley are a photographic bonanza. With the mountain range behind the dunes, you'll wish you had more CF cards!

If light painting is your thing, Ben will share his techniques as we light paint the ghost town of Ryolite at night.

So join us for this once-in-a-lifetime adventure and you'll be amazed at the photos your creativity will find!

Click here for more info

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Page, Arizona
May 10-13, 2012

Page, Arizona is a little known spot with big opportunity. This small town is located on the Colorado River overlooking the Glen Canyon Dam and will be base camp for a photo adventure that will include Slot Canyons, Monument Valley, Horseshoe Bend and Lake Vistas, to name a few.

Click here for more info

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Discover Iceland
June 24-30, 2012

Ben is returning to Iceland to lead a photography expedition into “The Land of the Midnight Sun.” On this amazing journey you will explore and photograph one of the most beautiful places on Earth. When we're not in the field, you will be learning how to refine and enhance your images in the digital darkroom.

Click here for more info

Jerome, AZ and more Route 66

Karen's shot of me at the Gold King Mine in Jerome, AZ.

While the bus was parked in the Sedona area this past week, I spent the first several days away from it. I flew to St. Louis and then Kansas City to present my "From Focus to Finished" seminar for Kelby Training. Karen stayed back at the bus exploring Sedona. Before I left for this trip, we did get to meet up with Rich Charpentier, who is a local photographer and fellow RVer (he has travelled a lot in an Airstream trailer). Karen was friends with him in the digital world and it was nice to finally meet! He also gave us some tips on where to shoot in the area. It was fun to see that his interests were similar to mine, especially in that he shoots a lot of Rt. 66 and abandoned America.

I flew back on Thursday and, before we left the area, we went to explore the town of Jerome. We had heard lots of great things about the place and it was easy to see why. The town was really unique, with lots of historic buildings, bed & breakfasts, art galleries and wineries (to Karen's delight!). We explored some galleries, tasted some wine and sought out the mine/museum we were told about. It's called the Gold King Mine and it's awesome. We arrived too late to shoot on Thursday but returned again on Friday and spent several hours there. The placed housed several old buildings and dozens of old vehicles. It was truly a photographer's playground.

Here is one of my shots from the King Gold Mine in Jerome, AZ.

Another thing worth mentioning about Jerome is the excellent Mexican place we ate lunch at. It was called Quince (15) and was excellent. We highly recommend it if you're ever in the area. And if you like margaritas, you're in luck. They had a whole menu of them. I'm not usually a margarita fan, but I ended up having TWO! (The Sangra-Rita)

Here's one of the images I captured while following Route 66. This one was taken in Seligman, AZ.

When we moved on from the Sedona area, we picked up Route 66 again and headed west. We made stops in Williams, where we spent a night, and then Seligman and Hackberry, before spending another night in Kingman.

We will most likely spend another morning shooting in the Kingman area and then head toward Las Vegas. That's where the bus will stay while Karen and I fly over to South Africa for a photo safari with Journeys Unforgettable! More to come…

Following the Mother Road to Flagstaff

An abandoned building I found on Route 66 en route to Sedona.

When the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta came to an end, we moved on in the direction of Sedona, Arizona. That area is just beautiful and Karen had never been there. I also needed to be close to an airport so I could fly out to teach two "From Focus to Finished" seminars, and the Flagstaff airport was convenient.

I love all the vintage signs I run across when traveling on Route 66. I also like using my tilt-shift lens to force additional perspective into the image, which is the exact opposite of what most people use the lens for.

Instead of taking the highway, which would have been the fast route to Sedona, we followed historic Route 66 from Albuquerque to Flagstaff. It took us a couple days to get there because of all the photo stops. Some of my favorite things to shoot are vintage and abandoned America, so Route 66 is a haven for me, and I've driven the entirety of it more than once.

The owner of this building on Route 66 was nice enough to let me shoot for a bit

One of the interesting things about Route 66 is that it's always changing. Many of the sights I saw and photographed this past week were very different from how they looked the first time I drove "the Mother Road." Either a place becomes abandoned and slowly decays leaving a shell of shapes and textures, or a place is restored … revived with new paint and a better reflection of how it looked in its prime. We made a lot of stops in the course of a few days, and I filled a lot of memory card space!

A shot of a fun cafe in Holbrook, AZ

When we arrived in the Sedona area, we started to make up for a lot of work time that was spent shooting on the road. I also had a slew of packages waiting for me at our RV park. I mentioned before that I just upgraded my computer to a beefier MacbookPro. The packages contained the parts I ordered to further trick out my new Mac. These included a solid state hard drive, another internal hard drive with more storage, and 16 gig of RAM. As if that weren't enough, I added a nice new Focal XS speaker system to top it off.

I'm installing the drives I got for my new MacbookPro!

We'll spend a bit of time exploring the Sedona area, and then we'll head back to Vegas. That's where we will park the bus while we fly out to a South African Safari! More to come..