Winter light is a landscape photographer’s dream. Low angles and bright sun make for shadow defining light even in the middle of the day. When the sun sets over snow, and bounces off its reflective surfaces, there is a glow about the land like at no other time.

This special light, which allows us to concentrate our focus on abstract patterns in black and white as well as grand vistas, begs to be processed with new HDR techniques. To get the most of a winter landscape while in the field, we focus on utilizing wide and telephoto lenses. Then, back in the classroom, we highlight black and white conversions and HDR processing of our color images.

Lectures cover the Adobe Lightroom workflow and advanced Adobe Photoshop post-processing techniques, such as layer blending, quick masking, and curves adjustment layers, used when dealing with winter light. We learn about dynamic range and scene brightness ratio, and Marc explains how to see in black and white and visualize in HDR. We review how various techniques help us make the transition from pre-visualization into a finished print or web display. Daily critiques get our creative juices flowing and refine everyone’s abilities and techniques.

This is a rare opportunity to spend a week in Santa Fe under the tutelage of a contemporary master of landscape photography.