2025 Photo Workshops Announcement

As most or many of you know, my main photography gig is teaching photography workshops. Each year I aim for April to release the next year’s workshops. This newsletter is going to be all shameless self promo about next year’s workshops. If you’re interested in my workshops, this will explain the release schedule and briefly talk about the workshops. This newsletter will also have pretty pictures for everyone else.

First a recent photo of a waterfall on the Cascade River, which is my favorite river to photograph. Flow levels are lower this spring but still beautiful.

Workshop Registration

Let’s start with workshop registration. Like previous years, this will happen in two phases.

1. Tuesday, April 23rd, 7:00am-ish: Alumni and Facebook Subscribers (become one here) registration. On Tuesday, April 23rd at about 7am, I’ll open up a special registration for alumni and subscribers. The registration link and registration password will be in the respective Facebook groups early Monday morning. If you aren’t on Facebook and are an alumni and want to register, email me to get the details. Depending on the workshop, there are between 4 and 8 open seats. The rest are reserved for general registration.

2. Thursday, April 25, 7:00am-ish: Any remaining seats from the alumni and subscribers registration and any seats that I held back will be opened to everyone. Due to the way my website works, I have to open each workshop manually. I’ll start at 7am and work my way down the list in the order the workshops appear on the list. You’ll find all the links to workshops here as they open: Photography Workshops.

I suspect that some of these will fill up quickly, but I know the the Lake Superior winter one is slow to fill up because people don’t want to think about winter when coming out of winter. That’s open already and people have started registering for it. I’m planning to run only one winter workshop instead of two in 2025. So, you’ll need to act faster this year if you want to do it.

If you’ve tracked my workshops, you’ll also notice that this is the fewest number of workshops that I’ve run in years. Back in the day, it was 16 a year. It’ll be 11 next year. This is due to potential trips, and I’m likely going to add in a photography class at the North House again in addition to the hand-drawn map making course that I’m currently offering there.

I’m also offering two blasts from the past. I’m offering the Tetons and Smokies again. If there are enough interested people, I could do two back-to-back workshops in the Tetons. So, if it is full when you are trying to register, let me know. I used to run back-to-back workshops there, and because I love it there, I’d love to do it again.

And I love the Smokies in spring. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is my favorite park to backpack in and photograph. Spring is my favorite time of year to be there. If I had to pick one destination outside of Minnesota to photograph the rest of my life, it would be the Smokies.

Here’s the list of workshops that I’m offering in 2025. Find them on my website by clicking here.

Minnesota Photo Workshops

• Jan 31 – Feb 2: Lake Superior Winter

• May 2-4: Waterfall Photo Workshop

• May 18-22: Learn Panoramic Photography to Capture the Milky Way

• July 20-24: Northern Night Sky

• Aug 7-10: Midsummer’s Dream

• Aug 20-24: Night Skies of the Gunflint

• Oct 1-5: Lake Superior Fall Color – 5 day

• Nov 7-9: Gales of November

• Dec 5-7: Seascapes of Lake Superior

Destination Photo Workshops

• April 14-18: Spring in the Smoky Mountains

• Sept 10-14: Grand Teton National Park

Among the 2025 workshops I’m offering are my popular classic night sky workshops. The Learn Panoramic Photography to Capture the Milky Way is new as of 2024. It has a long waiting list, so I’m offering it again in 2025 and adding a day. I’ll likely skip this in 2026 and then go every other year. Northern Night Sky is my classic sampler of one of the darkest locations in the US. We visit inland lakes and spend time on Lake Superior. Because there’s so much to explore in Cook County, years ago I added Night Skies of the Gunflint Trail. We visit areas along the Gunflint and a Bortle 1 location. Most of the locations on the workshop are near an International Dark Sky Association Dark Sky Sanctuary.

My season-based workshops are my winter workshop, which is one of my favorite. I love photographing Lake Superior in winter. I’m doing my annual waterfall workshop and am basing it out of Grand Marais, Minnesota. I’m also offering my five-day fall photo workshop. Fall in northern Minnesota is stunning, and the dates I picked are usually when the aspen and birch turn while late maples are often still hanging on.

I like to think of these three workshop as having seasonal focus, but for photo learning they are more general than my other workshops. These three and Gales of November are the best for beginners to landscape photography.

I have two workshops that are focusing specifically on Lake Superior. Gales of November is a workshop based on the waves of Lake Superior. The weekend that I planned the workshop is statistically the stormiest of the year. There’s no guarantee of big storms because statistics are statistics, but we will focus on the big lake regardless. Sometimes we do take a detour off of the lake to a waterfall or another location that I think you’ll appreciate.

Seascapes of Lake Superior is brand new for 2025. Our goal in that workshop is moody and darker Lake Superior seascape images. The sun rises and sets over Lake Superior from Grand Marais in early December, so we’re going to take advantage of that. We’ll also have a classroom session on editing darker images. Since I started posting these darker images lots of people have expressed interest in the process of making these. We’ll explore that in the workshop.

To wrap up these summaries, I’m running Midsummer’s Dream again. This is an unique workshop that focuses on a series of exercises involving Gestalt psychology. We photograph sunrise and sunset inland, visit a couple of waterfalls, photograph early morning light in the Grand Marais harbor, and photograph the full moon. Each day I challenge you with a couple of psychology-based exercises that can help improve your photography and capture the attention of your audience.

The next photo was taken on Midsummer’s Dream in 2022. It was one of the best sunrises that I’ve seen. August is such a great time to be on the north shore and we’ll take advantage of that and hopefully get foggy morning scenes like the one below.

Until next time

That sums up my 2025 workshop release schedule and brief info on each workshop. I’ll hopefully have all the course descriptions updated by the end of Monday.

The 2025 courses will open to alumni and subscribers on Tuesday, April 23rd. Then they open to everyone on Thursday, April 25th. This is the link to my main workshop page: https://www.bryanhansel.com/services/photography-workshops-and-photography-courses/

Then from April 26th to the 28th I teach my annual waterfall workshop (which I had a last minute cancel on. If interested email me). After that I’m heading to the Badlands and Black Hills and then Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Right after I get back I’m doing an online presentation for a photography club, and then my summer workshops kick in! Busy times ahead for me.

I’ll see you again in two weeks. Until then I hope you can get outside and take a few photos.

p.s. sign up early and sign up often for my workshops. :)