New Zealand

 
 
 
 

when & where?

South Island of New Zealand. We will be embarking and ending our trip in Christchurch.

March 13 - 21, 2026

We begin Wednesday March 11th in Adelaide and finish Monday April 20th in Adelaide at noon.

shooting locations:

  1. Mt Cook

  2. Lake Tekapo

  3. Lake Pukaki

  4. Queenstown

  5. Lake Hawea

  6. Castle Hill

acommodations

Large houses and hotels with single occupancy rooms.

logistics

We drive you! Pick up/drop off at airport along with driving for the duration of the trip. You are welcome to rent your own car for more freedom/flexibility.

You are responsible for all flights to and from New Zealand, we will coordinate with you pick up times at the airport.

workshop cost & payment t7erms

The tuition for this workshop is $7,500 with a non-refundable deposit of $1,500 to secure one of the limited spots on this small group photo adventure tour. The remaining total balance of the workshop is due 60 days before the workshop begins but you can pay the remaining balance any time. Alumni, veterans, and public servants (police & fire) please reach out for discount.

The Southern Milky Way over Mt Cook

difficulty

This astro + photography workshop is great for advanced beginners and all levels above! We will be covering the fundamentals of night photography; planning your shot, single exposure settings, light painting, etc. as we build into more advanced concepts like tracking, panoramas, and image blending! This workshop requires decent mobility and at times requires 2-3 miles of hiking with your camera gear on uneven surfaces.

what you will learn

Everything photography! We specialize in long exposure night photography shooting and editing techniques, however we have tons of opportunities to do landscape photography. We teach blue hour blending, star tracking, panoramas, timelapses, color theory, advanced noise and star reduction, and much more. We do edit sessions at our hotels/in restaurants and follow up the workshop with a custom editing video using the images we took.

The Large Magellanic Cloud. One of the jewels targets to capture in the Southern Hemisphere!

group size

This workshop is limited to 6 participants with 3 instructor guides: Derek Culver, Tom Rae, and Chris Terstegge. We like to keep our group sizes small (some workshops say 10:2 student to teacher ratio is “small”, which is ridiculous!) so we can give you lots of one-on-one instruction and tailor our lessons to your individual goals and needs. These trips are astro + photography learning based but we keep our learning environment relaxed, jovial, and full of personable people ready to make awesome memories together!

overview

Join several world class astro + photographers as we tour and teach you the art of night photography in one of the best world class locations in the Southern Hemisphere.

big bend gallery