Flooding on the Badwater salt flats is fairly rare, but after heavy rains, at the end of 2019 water persisted from late November through early January! I'l be heading to Death Valley next week. I can let you know at the end of the week when I return whether the heavy August 2023 rains left persistent water through September and into October (watch my photostream for current images uploaded).

This short time-lapse video is from the first night of our Winter Light workshop in December 2019. We're offering two trips for shooting under low angle winter light in the 2023-24 season, in December and January.

The December trip will feature three days and nights in lodging, and after daytime landscape photography at night we'll practice we'll practice dark sky night photography. We have a lot of experience teasing out where to be when for optimal light. For example, Mesquite Flat sand dunes are great at sunrise and sunset, but in the weeks around the winter solstice there's an even better time to be out on the dunes. Join us to find out when and see why. On the last two nights we'll go somewhere remote to camp, and shoot the Geminid meteor shower. This year the peak of the meteor shower has no moon interference, so we'll have about 11 hours and 15 minutes of optimally dark skies. We should be able to capture hundreds of meteors, without a lot of people and lights around. If we're lucky, maybe we may have water on the Badwater salt flats as well? The water table should be really shallow after the heavy 2023 rains, the strengthening El Nino should give Death Valley more passing moisture than usual, and as we saw in 2019, water on the Badwater salt flats sticks around much longer in the cooler, less windy months.

For the January session, we'll practice landscape photography during the days, then post-process some of our shots to black and white in the evenings. So we'll have increased emphasis on subjects, compositions, textures, and anticipating how the various elements will work in black and white... pre-visualizing what the scenes can be post-processed into. (This is the process that many landscape photographers use for color too.) We'll cover exposure and post-processing techniques for maximizing the fidelity of the color and black and white images you have to work with, and the conversion process that gives you the greatest control over your end results. See my Death Valley Black and White album for samples: www.flickr.com/photos/jeffreysullivan/albums/721577198831...

Our 2023-24 workshop dates have been released through Q1 2024, and registration is open!
www.jeffsullivanphotography.com/workshops/

This video was used for the opening of the interview I had with PhotographyTalk:
youtu.be/ltuLlHJ6D2U

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The sun has been particularly active in 2023. It is approaching a solar maximum, so conditions for night photography could get even more interesting in the coming months!

Our next night photography workshop is coming up fast: August 19-23, 2023.

This video was captured at Topaz Lake on the California/Nevada border, at about 38 degrees north latitude. The sound in the background is a recording of waves in the lake that night, along with fish feeding on the surface.

Tags:   aurora borealis northern lights solar geomagnetic storm space weather astrophotography astronomy Topaz Lake Gardnerville Douglas County Nevada USA Eastern Sierra night starry sky landscape nature travel photography Nikon D850 Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 lens photo copyright 2023 Jeff Sullivan April all rights reserved Great Basin School Of Great Basin School of Photography HD timelapse video

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We only get particularly good moonless viewing conditions for meteor shower about every 4 years. In 2023 at this latitude we'll have a full 11+ hours of darkness during the Geminids! We'll bring a limited number of photographers with us to remote sites on the peak nights.

Here are three different cameras' views of the Geminid meteor shower in 2020.

Tags:   Geminids Death Valley National Park night Geminid meteor shower Death Valley National Park Shoshone Inyo County California USA landscape astrophotography nature travel photography road trip photo copyright 2020 Jeff Sullivan December HD timelapse video 24fps 1080P

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Time-lapse video and still image samples from our Bodie - Eastern Sierra workshop in July. We'll be back out with photographers this month!

The sound of coyotes in the background was captured during one of our workshop nights in Bodie.

Tags:   Tioga Pass Lake Mono Basin Eastern Sierra Lee Vining Mono County California United States USA landscape nature travel night photography Nikon D850 Nikkor 14-24mm f/2.8 lens photo copyright Jeff Sullivan 2023 July Bodie State Historic Park Bodie State Historic Park abandoned American Wild West mining ghost town rural decay Bridgeport workshop Jeff Sullivan all rights reserved

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Natural fireworks that won't set your neighborhood on fire, from our Nevada photography workshop in May.

Tags:   lightning storm rain Central Nevada Tonopah May 2023 landscape travel nature photography workshop timelapse video

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