Great Smoky Mountains National Park Spring TN/NC Townsend, Tennessee Apr 9-15, 2016 Tuition: $1295 Participants: 8
I am, first and foremost, a photographer of the Great Smoky Mountains and have been photographing professionally in them for over twenty years. For five of those I served as the staff photographer for Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I have hiked nearly all of the nine hundred miles of maintained trails the the Park and backpacked extensively in it. This Park is the back of my hand, and more than almost anything, I love sharing it photographically and otherwise with anyone I can. We will spend a week exploring the streams, early spring flowers, high country, spring atmospherics and light of this most-visited national park of all.
Spring in the Smokies is a time of new beginnings as winter loosens it grip on the hills and streams. As the buds turn to blossom, it becomes more than obvious why it has been suggested that it might well should have been named “Wildflower National Park.” The streams themselves are alive with the bounty of winter’s rain and snow, the gift of the “rainy season.” As the forest comes to life the green begins to creep slowly up the mountainsides like a living carpet. Cooler and warmer air masses mix and mingle producing cloudforms of exquisite beauty and fogs of moody presence. The light itself seems rarified, lighting the landscapes below. In a Smokies spring morning the entire world seems fresh and new, and photographically pristine. In a Smokies spring the pulse of creation is not only felt, it is also seen.
(828) 788-0687
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Acadia NP-Mount Desert Island, Maine Jun 15-21, 2016 Southwest Harbor, Maine Tuition: $1350 Participants: 8
Acadia National Park and Mount Desert Island are home to some of the most amazing scenery in the United States. I began photographing in Acadia in 1998 and soon realized that fall was not the only spectacular season. Spring in Acadia is a garden of floral delight: lupine, Clintonia, and bunchberry. It is a boreal forest gone wild with unimaginable lushness and new growth. It is a coastline of rock and sand that shout their volcanic origins in crashing surf. As it is all year, Acadia in spring is alive with history and wonder. Acadia is life and light come together in a visual feast.
When most people visit Acadia they remain among the icons. Cadillac Mountain, Otter Cliff, Sand Beach, Jordon Pond, Bass Harbor Light: these are the names that are known, and we will certainly spend some of our time with them. But over the years I have sought out and become intimate with the lesser known places of Acadia; places that in my mind are ever bit as awesome, every bit as beautiful, and every bit as worthy of our creative energies. These are the places that, as much as the icons, made Acadia so special to the likes of Eliot Porter, whose intimacy with this land has given us such a lasting portrait as a guide. We will work away from the crowds that amass in Bar Harbor and look for the quiet retreats and places of solitude that refresh the mind and the soul, and fill the heart with joy.
(828) 788-0687
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Photographic Creativity and Llamas Cortez, Colorado and the La Plata Mountains Jul 23-29, 2016 Tuition: $1900* Includes tent lodging, gear, food, and guidance for two nights and three full days Participants: 6
I have known Dr. Laura Higgins for almost twenty years, and for nearly all of that time she has been passionate about llama trekking. Long before she
and her husband, David Bray, relocated to Montezuma County (Cortez), Colorado, Laura operated a highly respected llama trekking company in the mountains of East Tennessee; and now she and David have created San Juan Mountains Llama Treks as a natural outgrowth of their passion and love of sharing llama trekking with others.
Laura and I have talked for several years about offering a photography workshop llama trek, and I am really pleased to announce that 2016 is the year. EarthSong in the San Juans/La Platas is a week-long llama trekking photography adventure we’ll experience in the heart of the San Juan summer. Montezuma County is the heart of one of America’s most amazing archaeological areas, and our time will be divided between a three-day and two-night llama trek into the beautiful San Juan Mountains, a day trip to Taylor Lake in the La Platas, and day-trips into the Canyons of the Ancients/Hovenweep National Monuments to some amazing Ancestral Puebloan sites.
(828) 788-0687
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Rhode Island Coast on the Cusp of Autumn Narragansett, Rhode Island Sept 17-23, 2016 Tuition: $1350 Participants: 8
While the glittering mansions of Newport may be what we think of when we think of it, the Coast of Rhode Island, the “Ocean State,” could never be so narrowly defined. Though small in size, its character looms large. From its founding, Rhode Island has defied both authority and simple categorization; and its coastline is no less intricate.
The Ocean State’s coast is a waterworld of deeply incised bays and rugged, rocky shores, punctuated by stretches of sand-covered beaches. There are razor-thin barrier headlands that guard marshes and forests in preserves with names like Trustom Pond and Sachuest Point, where sea birds and shore birds mingle on their annual pilgrimages across the globe.
History is here, too, beyond the “summer cottages.” Point Judith Light has welcomed ships to Narragansett Bay for over a hundred and twenty-five years, and there are Beavertail Light, Castle Hill Light, and Rose Island Light all filled with history and charm. Just inland can be found the villages of Peace Dale, Carolina, and Shannock, once boming mill towns until the textiles went South, now reminders of an Industrial Revolution that shook – and still shakes – the world. And always there is the Guilded Age charm of Newport founded in 1639, whose Colonial presence remains in its old town homes and churches wrought with such New England ornate simplicity.
The Rhode Island Coast is a time-worn stretch of diverse beauty, of rock and sand and water, of forest and fieldwhich bares its fluid soul to the curious and the carefully observant, and rewards them with images to be remembered for a lifetime. I have always been amazed that so much wonderous imagery can be contained in such a relatively small space.
(828) 788-0687
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The Awesome Upper Peninsula of Michigan Hancock/Houghton and Munising, Michigan Oct 1-7, 2016 Tuition: $1350 Participants: 8
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a land out of time. This is the land of Kitchi Gami, the largest freshwater lake in surface ar
ea on the planet. It is the land of the Anishinaabe and the trickster, Nanabozho, who will be to us but a friend and a guide. There are ancient mountains here and rocks from the basement of time. There are southern boreal conifer and hardwood forests that by happy coincidence have resulted in perhaps the most outstanding fall foliage display anywhere in the country. There are more than 4,000 lakes in the UP, many with interconnecting streams that often drop over waterfalls and cascades of amazing beauty. And there is history, rich and complex, fueled by a country’s desire for mineral and botanical treasure.
I bega
n coming to the UP in 2000 to photograph the color, and what I found compelled me to return every year until 2012, when I decided that the only fair thing to do was to begin alternating years here with other fall foliage locations. Every year I am away I miss being here and cannot wait for the chance to return.
There is so much to see and photograph in the Upper Peninsula that it is the only workshop or tour during which we will change locations so that we can maximize the creative and photographic adventure that awaits us.
(828) 788-0687
{tab Cape Cod Oct 10-16|orange} The Diverse Beauty that is Cape Cod North Truro, Massachusetts Oct 10-16, 2016 Tuition: $1350 Participants: 8
As the earth began to slowly warm, the great ice sheet that had spread southward from Canada began to retreat, haltingly, but to retreat nonetheless. Its southern-most had been miles out into what is now the Atlantic Ocean, roughly along the southern edge of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The slow, fumblin
g pull-back of the great, icy mass was nothing close to a straight line, and over the centuries of withdrawal there were periods of hesitation, driven by climate and ocean currents. Eventually retreat would continue, leaving in its wake geologic features we know as recessional moraines. The beautiful peninsula (actually with the construction of the canal in 1914, it is now technically an island) we know as Cape Cod is the recessional moraine gift to us of the Laurentide ice sheet 18,000 years ago, a natural sand-and-rock child of the ice and sea. The climate and the sea have always shaped the land, and the land has sparkled at the touch. Stunted pine forests, rippled primary dunes and grass-covered secondaries and tertiaries, bird-filled marshes, and rock-covered beaches are just some of the attractions that the nature of Cape Cod has to offer, with sinuous tidal streams and the ocean’s relentless surges thrown in for good measure.
And the hand of man has not been still. There are stolid lighthouses to warn away the vastness of the waves. There are farms carved out of the history of the earliest European migrations to these shores, and fishing villages where men and women still pin their lives and livelihoods on what the sea may give
Cape Cod is a land of many faces, where past connects with present, and old and new look directly at each other and smile; where mankind and the natural world have reached a compromise that reflects the better nature of both.
(828) 788-0687
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Canyon Country of Southeastern Utah
Moab, Utah
Oct 29-November 4, 2016
Tuition: $1500
Participants: 7
The Canyon Country of Southeastern Utah is one of the most starkly beautiful places on the entire planet. Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Manti-La Sal National Forest, Bureau of Land Management’s Cedar Mesa with its amazing collection of Anasazi ruins and sacred sites, the Colorado River Road (U
tah Hwy128 – The Upper Colorado River Scenic Byway): each of these singular-sounding name
s represents, in fact, an entire collection of image-creating opportunities which can keep anyone busy being creative for days on end. This redrock kingdom is a spiritual space that defies description, easy or otherwise. I have spent day after day learning the intricacies of this wondrous land so that I can share a connection to them with you. We’ll spend a week working from Moab, Utah at the epicenter of all this incredible assorted geologic magic . Autumn in Red Rock Country is a blaze of cottonwood and aspen, light so sharp and crisp it will cut to the core of your senses and leave you breathless, and rock so baffling in its complex geometry that you’ll swear wizards are to blame; but it’s simply the Earth in all of its glory putting on a show that it alone can manifest.
