Moab

Workshop Details

May 18-20, 2026 — Sold Out, Join Waitlist Below

This is a 3-night, 3-day workshop. Your adventure begins on the afternoon of May 18, and ends after a final night shoot on May 20.

$1,545 + applicable taxes.

Skill level

Open to all who have an understanding of the basic principles of photography and of their cameras.

Group size

14, with 2 instructors — 7:1 ratio

NPS Website

Arches National Park · Canyonlands National Park

Workshop Leaders

Registration

Hoping to get a spot? Sign up below for our no-fee waitlist.

The Moab Experience

Moab is a neat little town. It’s nestled in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a bigger nowhere, yet it’s home to countless roads and trails that will bring you to many magical places. And when you think you know them all, you find more, always more, around another corner or around another bend.

We’ll spend three days and nights exploring the wilds around this Utah desert town, looking for rock formations that rise into the sky (i.e., arches) and rock formations that sink into the ground (i.e., canyons), and anything else that catches our fancy. We’ll be out in late-day light and stay through twilight and into the night, photographing stars and the Milky Way stretching from one horizon to the next.

One night we’ll focus on Arches National Park, one night we’ll focus on Canyonlands National Park, and one night we’ll focus on another grand landscape in the Moab area.

Note that light painting is not allowed in Arches and Canyonlands. We will practice twilight and starlight blends in the field, and we will …

After the workshop ends, we will run a special one-night online processing class to show different techniques for blending all those sky and foreground exposures you shot. This class will merge the Moab group with the Bisit group—two simultaneous workshops coming together to share images at the end!

Nightscaper Photo Conference in Four Corners

This workshop begins the day after the 2026 Nightscaper Photo Conference in Four Corners, providing an opportunity to attend the world’s leading in-person night photography conference and then cap it off with an adventure to Moab. You don’t need to attend either in order to attend the other—we’re simply highlighting the possibility. The conference is an in-person event devoted to astro-landscape photographers, scientists, artists and activists who wish to enjoy and preserve the night skies. For more information, visit nightscaper.com.

What You Should Know

Participants must have at least basic photo skills, know their cameras well, and be comfortable shooting raw in manual mode.

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

What You Will Learn

This workshop emphasizes honing your night skills and creating the most spectacular photographs once the sun dips below the horizon. We specifically chose the timing of this workshop to occur during the waxing crescent moon, giving us perfect conditions for star trails, star points and Milky Way, all with very gentle moonlight illuminating the landscape.

TOPICS COVERED WILL INCLUDE:

• star-point and star-trail exposures

• Milky Way panos

• shooting and blending landscape and dark-sky exposures

• scouting for night photography

• and more …

The workshop will include some daytime classroom time, as well as some daytime touring and photography.

Night Conditions

Logistics & General Info

Decisions …

I’m a fair-weather camper. I love sleeping out in a tent—as long as the air isn’t cold, snow isn’t on the ground and rain isn’t falling. The worst part about the latter is that everything gets wet, especially my tent, which then needs to be packed wet, traveled with wet, then sometime later opened up wet so that it can air-dry, inevitably in my living room.

The first time I visited the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, I was there solo for night photography. I shot a rock formation with some star trails behind it. Things finished late, with me tired, and the night weather was clear and pleasant, so instead of driving back to any hotel in Moab, I decided to camp in the park. I set up my tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and passed out.

In just a few hours the soft light of dawn came and awakened me. I don’t usually force myself up for a sunrise after a night shoot, but if I happen to be awake anyway, then I’ll seize the opportunity. So that morning—my eyes puffy, my hair unkempt, my brain foggy—I unzipped the tent door and poked my head out into the cool morning air to see if the conditions might be right for a sunrise worth rising for. My view out the tent was straight across the Canyonlands landscape, where I could see a storm moving from the west, coming right at me.

Yep. Rain was on the way, and it was going to make everything wet.

I had to work fast. I quickly popped out of my sleeping bag, threw on my clothes and climbed out of the tent, tripping over invisible objects, grabbing sundries, stuffing things in random bags. Then, from the corner of my vision, I saw a glint. The tiny edge of the morning sun slipped over a ridge on the eastern horizon and beamed unbelievably warm light onto the scrubby, red-rock scenery all around. I knew what that meant.

I turned my head toward the coming storm, and in front of the sheets of approaching rain, there it was: a beautiful, full double rainbow, stretching from one mesa to another, in beautiful light, over the beautiful Utah desert.

The rain was approaching rapidly. I knew that when it reached me, the rainbow would be gone, my camping gear would be wet, and I would be wet too. In that moment, I had only two choices, and I had to choose quickly. I could either finish my race to break camp before the rain hit, or I could photograph the rainbow.

I did what we all would do.