Great Sand Dunes & the Perseids

Workshop Details

August 10-15, 2023 — Completed

This is a 5-night, 6-day workshop. Your adventure begins on the morning of Thursday, August 10, and ends after a final slideshow on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 15.

$2,195 + 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

NPS website

Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve

Workshop Leaders

Registration

This event has passed. Thanks for your interest!

The Great Sand Dunes Experience

Successfully photographing a meteor shower is a bucket-list goal for many night photographers.

This workshop will take you on a complete journey that includes planning, photographing and post-processing your image set with the express intent of creating the elusive radiant composite.

We’ll be doing it in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time.

The location: Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve is an ideal location to photograph the Perseid Meteor Shower, as the park has a major land feature to the north/northeast (where the shower radiant rises): the sand dunes that tower 8,000 to 8,700 feet and the background Sangre de Cristo mountains at 14,000 feet hugging around them. All of this is in the foot of a wide valley.

Being at this elevation also has weather benefits. The temperature in the middle of August can be brutal elsewhere, but with an average of 78 F in the daytime and 49 at night, you’ll be very comfortable.

The 2023 Perseids will include 5 hours and 44 minutes of darkness, and only an 8.3 percent waning crescent moon to gently kiss the landscape when above the horizon (if you can stay up that long). The meteors will peak in the early morning with nearly 83 per hour. What’s all this mean? It’s the best predicted opportunity to photograph a meteor shower in 2023.

Our program will prepare you to understand how to plan for a meteor shower, as well as how to capture it in all its glory. We’ll cover composing and choosing a blue hour landscape to blend, or gentle light painting. You’ll also get detailed demonstrations and feedback on post-processing masterpiece composites.

You will grow on this workshop. It will combine all the things you know about night photography and synthesize them into approaching a scene with a clear and specific goal in mind. If you need to learn some things, no worries, you have two instructors on hand who will guide you to success.

This is definitely a workshop for which you want to bring two or more camera kits. Your main camera will spend a lot of time facing one direction, busy most of the night. So your second camera can be used to make other images of this awe-inspiring location.

If mastering meteor showers is on your must-do list, then this is the workshop for you.

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 capturing meteor showers, then shifting gears to dark sky star points, star trails, light painting and blue hour blends.

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

In addition to learning more about plenty of other night photography techniques, you will learn how to become a master meteor shower photographer during the best predicted meteor event of 2023.

TOPICS COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

• planning with PhotoPills, off-site and on location

• how to compose and capture a meteor shower radiant, or meteors in general

• how to capture and process a blue hour blend 

• post-processing composites in Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop, including meteor detections, masking and alignment

• 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. Participants can stay out shooting as long as they, or their camera’s batteries, hold out. While in the field, the instructors will demonstrate their own techniques and will work with participants one-on-one to make sure everyone gets the most out of the workshop.

Our locations have generous room to explore, so everyone will be able to spread out and not get in one another’s frames. Each participant will have the opportunity to work one-on-one with Matt and Tim in the field.

We do not tell our attendees what to photograph, and we won’t line you up in a row to all shoot the same thing (unless it’s helpful to get some people on track). Although, we do have a killer scene planned for the peak of the meteor shower and we guarantee you will want to train your lens in the direction we suggest. As always in our workshops, we encourage you to use what you have learned to create your own unique images, and to let us guide you through the process should you desire.

We do not teach you to do what we do, but rather how to develop your own night vision.

The central focus of this workshop is working toward achieving the challenging composite image that is a meteor shower radiant. Outside of that, you are certainly welcome to shoot anything and everything in a manner that pleases you. And not every night is dedicated to this, only a couple/few of them. On other nights we will visit many locations in and around Great Sand Dunes.

Night Conditions

Logistics & General Info

An experience too good to do just once …

My first foray to Great Sand Dunes was a solo trip, and the experience was profound. I was car camping for a night and hustled waaay too much gear out across the stream and to only the base of the dunes. It was a night full of starlight and coyote calls. My imagination overstimulated and I had an incredible evening. So good, in fact that I came back with a workshop group to tackle photographing the Perseids. We came and conquered!

I find the dunes to be at times solemn and other times violent with thunderstorms rolling across the 50-mile-wide mountain valley. The constant wind from the west and the curl of winds over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains towering above at 12,000 feet both push the dunes into the corner, where they stay, ever changing.

It’s remarkable that America’s tallest inland sand dunes start at 8,000 feet of elevation. I figured it would have been on some low desert floor in the Mojave or Great Basin. But no, they undulate on the spine of the Rockies.

The curtain of mountains wrapping around from the east to the north form a perfect frame for the Perseid Meteor Shower, which rises slightly east of north. And once you ascend the sand, you find the dune-tops rolling in front of you until they seem to collide into the mountainsides which then rush steeply to the horizon, where the north end of the Milky Way calmly glides across the heavens. It’s also where you find the constellation Perseus, our friend and companion for a few nights as we seek the penultimate meteor shower image: the radiant composite.

I’ve had stimulating experiences photographing the dunes from afar on the valley floor, up the mountainside a bit to the south, from the bed of Medano Creek, from the foot of the dunes and of course after trekking upward atop the dunes themselves. I hope you’ll come along and experience them with us while striving to make the complicated art that is the meteor shower radiant composite.

See you there, under fire-streaked skies.