In this time of COVID and non-travel, I find comfort in going back to “the time before” and searching through my archives of past Arizona Highways Photo Workshops (later, PhotoScapes) trips. It’s been fun to look back and compare old images to now and see growth in my skills. One of the largest areas of growth for me has been organizing my photos within Lightroom. I have devised over the years a consistent work-flow that includes downloading, marking favorites, editing some of those, and assigning them a color or star rating depending on how I think I’ll use them. And finally, adding keywords so I can find the images when needed. Apparently, as I’m noticing as I go through the archives, I didn’t do a lot of that early in my career as a trip leader (later, photoguide) with Highways.

My third workshop ended up being in my hometown of Flagstaff, with Shane McDermott, called Mountains and Meadows. That’s exactly what we shot, mountains and meadows…and sunflowers, lots of sunflowers. August is sunflower season in Flag and we took full advantage of it.

Home base was a local hotel in town. I was new and didn’t realize I could probably have stayed at home, in my own bed, and joined the group each morning but hindsight is 20/20 and I stayed at the hotel. That was weird. I felt like I was in another town besides Flagstaff. It was a self-driving workshop with carpooling highly recommended. Our first shoot on Friday found us in Government  Prairie, west of town off Interstate 40 for sunset.

The prairie was wide open with great views of the San Francisco Peaks. I found our participants to be more interesting.

What’s great about our participants is that sometimes they become Arizona Highways PhotoScapes Volunteers! Like Dianne here. I forgot all about meeting her on this trip until I dug out this image!

Saturday morning came early. We headed out to Sunset Crater National Monument East of Flagstaff to shoot…sun RISE! at 4:30 a.m. Shane does things a little differently and began the shoot with some morning sunrise yoga stretches. After that, we headed out to shoot some sunflowers.

Don’t forget to shoot all sides of your subject. You may surprise yourself with what you find!

The Sunset Crater area is known for its fields of yellow in August. The red shirt on this participant made for great contrast.

With so much yellow I decided it would be cool to try it in black and white. I was happy with the results. I’ve since gotten into the habit of trying black and white on images whose color or lighting I can’t get quite right.

Saturday wound up being a big day for shooting. On the way to our afternoon location, we stopped at the popular sunflower field near Schultz Pass Road along Highway 180 heading to Snow Bowl. The field did not disappoint.

I decided to put the mailboxes in the foreground and really liked the outcome.

We ran into an artist doing an “open-air” painting of the same view. I could have photographed her all afternoon.

We then headed up Snow Bowl Road and stopped at Aspen Corner for a short hike to a wildlife water tank and amazing views of the Peaks.

The mountain had wildflowers and wonderful views in all directions.

It proved to be a great location for sunset as well.

I shot the above image then turned the lens to my left to capture our crew photographing the same scene.

The final shoot on Sunday found us at The Nature Conservancy out Forest Road 151. There were old cabins and full views of the mountains. I was drawn to the details around the cabins.

One of the greatest experiences of these workshops is attending a critique session of our photographs and seeing all of the different images captured by all the different people and their different visions of the same subjects. It does wonders to spark creativity and open up your eyes to see things in a different way.

By mid-afternoon Sunday the workshop drew to a close. I was happy with what I had learned and inspired by the people I had learned it from. I found myself looking forward, with great anticipation, to whatever and whoever the next workshop brings.

Join me next week for a one-day workshop in Tucson at the Sonoran Desert Museum.

Happy Shooting!!