Monhegan Island
National Parks at Night returns to Monhegan for a full five-night workshop on one of our favorite Islands. Monhegan is a place that people go back to over and over again. It’s hard to stay away for long. We’ll explore this peaceful oasis entirely on foot, covering subjects such as the local lighthouse, the village, the waterfront cliffs and a nearly century-old shipwreck.
Workshop Details
Monhegan Island Workshop
July 3-8, 2023 — Completed
This is a 5-night, 6-day workshop. Your adventure begins on the morning of Monday, July 3, and ends after a final slideshow on Saturday, July 8––in time to catch the last ferry back to the mainland.
$1,995 + 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
14, with 2 instructors — 7:1 ratio
Workshop Leaders
Maine Lighthouses Add-On
June 30-July 1, 2023
This is an optional overnight experience at the Pemaquid Point and Marshall Point lighthouses. See further below for more info.
$899 + applicable taxes. After registration for the main workshop, you'll receive a link to register for the add-on option.
Skill level
Intermediate and above.
Group size
14, with 2 instructors — 7:1 ratio
Registration
This event has passed. Thanks for your interest!
| • Deposit of $600 is required to reserve your spot at the workshop. |
| • Balance of $1,995 is due on April 4, 2023. —> Pay balance here. |
| • You may choose the “Pay in Full” ticket if you desire to pay all at once. |
| • Last day for a cancellation request is April 3, 2023 (see cancellation and refund policy). |
| • The workshop fee does not include lodging, food, airfare, or transportation to Monhegan Island. |
The Monhegan Island Experience
This is a workshop with borders. Boundaries. The entirety of our experience will be confined to one small island, 10 miles off the coast of Maine. There are only a couple of vehicles on the island, and no paved roads—in fact, even the dirt roads are really just wide paths.
It’s an opportunity to get under the surface of the place, to begin to understand it. To really know it, you’d have to spend an entire season there. We can’t do that, but the island and the community are small enough that five nights will provide more than just a taste. We’ll have enough time to get into the rhythm of island life and to explore the various elements of the landscape.
Think of this as an opportunity to make a portrait of a place, of a unique community. Perhaps you’d like to make it a more personal essay, and to explore some part of yourself. Whatever you decide to make of your time on Monhegan with us, it’s a rare opportunity to slow down and focus on a single idea or concept. This will be our goal for the workshop, to create a nocturnal photo essay filtered through your own photographic vision.
We’ll spend time on the first day just walking around the island to get a feel for it, and we’ll meet both as a group and individually during the week as the concept for your project evolves. Lance and Chris will provide guidance and technical assistance as needed, but this is a workshop where you will work at your own pace as you discover and choose how to record and reveal your experience on the island.
Think of it as an opportunity to go beyond simply the visual, and to make images with a deeper meaning. Think of it as a project, or a series, rather than singular imagery.
The Add-On Experience
Pemaquid and Marshall Point Lighthouses
Note: This is an optional, additional experience to be held immediately before the main workshop begins, intended for registered attendees interested in a lighthouses adventure.
Spend two nights before the workshop refining your skills photographing lighthouses, at two of the best on the entire coast of Maine.
We’ll be based at the wonderful Bradley Inn in New Harbor, a stone’s throw from Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, our first night’s location. Our adventure will begin with a traditional New England lobster bake once we settle into our accommodations, and then we’ll walk over to the lighthouse for a lesson in the special techniques involved with photographing an intermittent-flashing beacon. We’ll spend the entire night along the coast near the lighthouse.
On the second night, we’ll photograph Marshall Point Lighthouse, which is one of Chris’ all-time favorites. Marshall Point has a crazy-bright continuous beacon, and we’ll learn and use different techniques to photograph this one.
Both of these nights will help prepare you to photograph the Monhegan Island Lighthouse once we get to the island.
Note: This optional add-on is available only to workshop attendees. You’ll get a link to purchase a ticket after registering for the main workshop.
What You Should Know
We won’t be teaching the basics of night photography on this workshop, as our goal will be more about completing an interpretive photo essay than learning basic skills.
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.
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. Alternatively or 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. You’ll go home after the workshop with a body of images based on a single theme. Your instructors will help you bring that theme into focus, and they will guide you through the process of developing an idea into a body of work.
TOPICS COVERED WILL INCLUDE:
developing a theme-based project from concept to completion that can be used as a basis for future, longer-term projects
writing a concept statement to help clarify project goals
sequencing and editing a series of images to maximize impact
This workshop will have both field instruction and classroom discussions. There will be free time to explore the island and to work on your ideas. Participants can stay out shooting as long as they, or their camera’s batteries, hold out. While in the field, the instructors will work with participants one-on-one to make sure everyone gets the most out of the workshop. During classroom sessions, there will be presentations by the instructors, but we will focus on sharing everyone’s work and ideas with each other.
We do not tell our attendees what to photograph, and that has never been more the case than in this workshop. We do not teach you to do what we do, but rather how to develop your own vision.
Night Conditions
Logistics & General Info
Travel
You’ll need to get to Port Clyde, Maine, in time to catch the ferry to Monhegan Island on Monday, July 3. You’ll want to be on the first ferry in the morning (they start early), or sail over the night before. We will communicate your options via email after registration.
You will need a car to get to Port Clyde, but you will not be able to bring it to Monhegan Island. It’s mostly a no-car zone—even most of the residents don’t have one. If you would like to share a rental car to get from the airport to the ferry, let us know and we’ll connect you with someone like-minded in the group.
Nearby Airports:
Portland (PWM) — 2 hours from Port Clyde
Bangor (BGR) — 2 hours
Boston (BOS) — 3.5 hours
Lodging & Food
We will be staying at the Monhegan House. We have reserved a block of rooms for the workshop. The Monhegan House offers 26 bright, comfortable rooms on four floors with beautiful views of the ocean, the lighthouse and meadow, or both. It offers both single and double rooms that are appointed with period furniture and plush, comfortable bedding.
Delicious breakfasts and dinners are included with your room. The island has a few lunch options, of course in walking distance.
You are responsible for booking and paying for your own meals and accommodations.
Weather
Expect daytime highs in the 80s F, lows in the upper 50s.
Recommended Attire
Shorts and short-sleeve shirts for daytime, light pants and long-sleeve shirts for night. A sweatshirt and medium-weight jacket will likely be useful. Layers are good. Comfortable and waterproof shoes with good soles are recommended for getting around. There won’t be long hikes, but we will be scrambling over rocky shores and on trails, so quality trail shoes would be optimal.
Exertion Level
The exertion level of this workshop is Easy to Moderate. (See more about our classifications.)
No vigorous activity will be required during the workshop, but please consider your physical abilities prior to registering. We will be walking to all of our locations on the island. There won’t be any long or difficult hikes, but you should be comfortable carrying your own equipment over uneven ground in the dark.
Additional Information
Please read our FAQs section for more information about skill and gear requirements, and other information that pertains to all our workshops.
If you have questions, please contact us—we're happy to talk it over with you.
An easy tradition to follow ...
“This small island community off the coast of central Maine holds a special place in our hearts.”
Our good friend Jeff McCrum has been vacationing with his family on Monhegan for a long time. For as long as we’ve known him, he’d been telling us that we needed to go and to do a workshop there. We took him up on the suggestion in 2020, and dipped our toes in the water by spending three nights on Monhegan during our Coastal Maine workshop.
Once we got there, Chris and I quickly realized that we should have not been so tentative, and rather should have taken Jeff’s full-throated praise of the island’s charms to heart. We needed to do a full workshop on Monhegan. The charming dirt roads, the quaint clapboard houses, the sailboats and fishing vessels, the cool summer-night breezes, the salty air, the lighthouses, the rocky-shore shipwreck, the forest fairy houses, the meandering trails … all tied together perfectly for a quintessential New England experience.
As you’ve read, this small island community off the coast of central Maine holds a special place in our hearts.
We had the incredibly good fortune of timing our first visit to Monhegan during Comet Neowise’s brief visit to planet Earth. It made our short time there even more memorable, and Chris’ unwitting image of someone sleeping in a window beneath the comet was my favorite image by any of the five of us made in 2020.
While we can’t promise you a comet, we know that you’ll fall in love when you visit too, and that you’ll long to return as we do. There is a tradition of throwing wildflowers from the bow of the departing ferry, which supposedly guarantees that someday you will come back to Monhegan. We whole-heartedly recommend following the local customs.
