Arches: Panorama Intensive

Workshop Details

February 16-21, 2024 — Completed

This is a 5-night, 6-day workshop. Your adventure begins on the morning of Friday, February 16, and ends after a final slideshow on the afternoon of Wednesday, February 21.

$3,800 + applicable taxes. Register below.

Skill level

Intermediate and above. Participants should have a firm grasp of the basic principles of photography and of their cameras, and have a comfortable understanding of night photography fundamentals.

Group size

8, with 2 instructors — 4:1 ratio

NPS website

Arches National Park

Workshop Leaders

Registration

This event has passed. Thanks for your interest!

The Arches Pano Experience

The Northern Hemisphere Milky Way and the winter triangle of constellations is a wondrous spectacle. Perhaps you’ve tried night sky panoramas and run into troubles, or you simply want to get better or even more consistent. If you say to yourself, “I’d really like to master that …” then this is the right workshop for you.

You’ll be taught by deeply passionate and experienced night photographers dedicated to carefully crafting and processing night sky panoramas. They will cover everything from the basics to complex multirow panoramas.

Arches in winter is an ideal location for this workshop, with ample room to spread out and still be able keep your pano sweep clear of other attendees.

This will be a complete curriculum focused on teaching you everything: planning, gear, capture and processing/compositing.

Also note that attendance is limited to eight people by design, so you all have more room to spread out and compose successful panos, and receive extra attention in the field for learning this specialized technique.

You’ll be capturing panoramas with a 53 percent first quarter moon setting at 1:10 a.m. to a 97.1 percent waxing gibbous moon setting at 5:54 a.m. Sunset is at 6:00 p.m. and the galactic center rises around 3:50 a.m. each night. The first few nights we can capture the galactic core before dawn, if we choose as a group to pursue a Milky Way arch panorama.

What You Should Know

This workshop caters to knowledgeable photographers with an intermediate or higher skill set. Participants should have a firm grasp of the basic principles of photography and of their cameras, and have a comfortable understanding of night photography fundamentals. We will be happy to offer advice and answer questions about both day and night photography, but the focus of the formal education will be panorama photography.

If you would like to attend this workshop but are unsure whether you have adequate night photography skills, we can offer pre-workshop tutoring to get you ready for your adventure with us. Additionally, a few of us have written books that may be productive pre-workshop reads.

What You Will Learn

We hope to push you to step outside your comfort zone—to test the limits of what you and your camera can do.

TOPICS COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

• planning a panorama remotely and in the field

• choosing and using the right gear

• understanding and finding your nodal point/eliminating parallax to avoid stitching errors

• setup and capture of single-row panoramas

• setup and capture of multirow panoramas

• setup and capture of vertoramas

• post-processing your panoramas in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and PTGui Pro

• understanding pano projections and distortion

• blending blue hour foregrounds with starry skies

• and more …

This workshop will have both field and classroom instruction. We will be in the classroom during the day, and out in the field at different locations each night.

PANOPHERNALIA

To get the most out of the workshop, you will need some specific gear and software.

You do not need a panorama rig/kit with a rotator, but having one will enable you to make more accurate, repeatable panoramas, and is strongly recommended.

Why a rotator with clicks? Not having to repeatedly turn on your flashlight to see how many degrees you rotated will significantly improve your night panos. Having a reliable rotation solution is also crucial for multirow captures without parallax stitching errors.

If you want to talk about your gear before committing, please contact us to discuss. We will also have some informational emails and a Zoom call or two leading up to the workshop to help you prepare, and part of that will be discussing gear.

Below is what we require and what we recommend. If you want to invest in gear beforehand, attendees will receive access to special discounts after registration.

Required:

1. a solid, dependable tripod

2. a balancing head (e.g., the Novoflex MBAL20, Fanotech EZ-Leveler II or Benro LBA2)

3. a RAW-capable mirrorless or DSLR camera

4. a reliable way to trigger your camera without vibration or flashing lights (intervalometer, wireless trigger, etc.)

5. minimum: an invertible ball head (e.g., the Acratech GXP-SS or Novoflex ClassicBall)*

* you will not be using this if you have a pano rig (unless this is your leveling head)

Strongly Recommended:

• a dedicated panorama rig with rotator (e.g., the Novoflex VR-System 6/8, VR-System Slim, or Fanotech M2 w/RD16-II or M1-L w/RD16-II)

• if not a rig, then a rotator with detents (e.g., the Novoflex Pano-Plate Q6/8, Fanotech Advanced Rotator RD8-II or Benro DP70) and a nodal rail (e.g., the Acratech Nodal Slide or Novoflex QPL-Panorama)

Again, don’t fret about what you have/need while considering this workshop. We can talk about your kit. But we feel it’s important to know beforehand that some key pieces of gear will make a big difference to get the most out of the trip.

Software:

Our post-processing work will be in Adobe Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and PTGui.* Prior knowledge of Photoshop and PTGui Pro are not required, but knowing how to work with layers and masks in Photoshop will help you greatly. Feel free to reach out beforehand for assistance or suggestions on how to best improve your knowledge of these topics.

* Required software.

Night Conditions

Logistics & General Info

A Dream Come True—Again …

On January 15, 2014, I visited Arches National Park under a winter full moon. The crisp, directional light reflected off the crystalline blanket of snow and slick rock. Stony shapes thrust into the air in seemingly impossible shapes. And the crown of stars drifted solemnly onward as my mind raced and my heart soared.

This photographic experience excited me like nothing else. Not bad for a first impression, right? That one night left me feeling full. Despite that, I wanted more. I also wanted to share that elation with other people—those feelings I had exploring the park and making astro-landscape images.

I brought that feeling and sense of urgency to Gabe. We talked about what we wanted to do more of—what thrilled us. Where we wanted to go and how we could bring the “gospel of night photography” to the masses. That’s when the idea for National Parks at Night was born, and we knew it was good.

So we threw ourselves into finding the right partners and building the dream. My second visit was with Gabe, and we met Tim at Arches. That was super fun. We had a couple of nights making photography and discussing the future, including Tim signing on to NPAN.

My third visit was with Tim again, and it was one of the first five workshops that we presented as National Parks at Night. It was chilly, light painting was still allowed and cameras were not nearly as good as they are now.

Now Tim and I return once more. And I cannot express how eager I am to celebrate 10 years of knowing this spectacular park. The vistas and the incredible shapes eroded into stone are an ideal playground for a workshop focused on panoramas. I’ve come full circle.