So You Want to Run Workshops (part one)

A Western grebe in breeding plumage swims along the waters of the prairie potholes looking for a mate. Photographed from a floating blind at 560mm f/4 (400mm f/2.8 with a 1.4x teleconverter added). Photo and article by: Annalise Kaylor

Not that long ago, a photographer friend of mine reached out to ask some questions about getting into teaching wildlife photography workshops. She has been on a few workshops already herself and has a general idea of what they involve, but wanted to hear about all of the things she wasn’t thinking about.

I love my friend. She is a talented photographer and she creates beautiful imagery. But she is the last person on this planet I would take a workshop with. And sure enough, once I started answering all of her questions she came to the conclusion that she wasn’t cut out for the level of detail and upfront work involved.

We have a handful of people in our mentorship program who have expressed interest in running workshops as a means for income generation with their work, so I wanted to walk through some of the considerations for anyone else thinking about adding them to their business.

Jared has been doing workshops for 20 years. I’ve been doing them far less time, but I do run all of the operations and logistics for the workshops Jared and I do together. There are a handful of things people are often surprised about when it comes to leading workshops, so for the first installment of this series, I wanted to touch on a handful of considerations a lot of people considering workshops didn’t realize is part of that job.

Fronting the Funds

Workshops are not inexpensive to run, especially if you are taking people to popular wildlife photography locations like Yellowstone, Costa Rica, or Alaska. Almost all vendors for workshops will require full payment before they will secure your dates.

As a real-time example, Jared and I are doing a workshop in Kenai Fjords National Park next week. We spend five days on the water photographing humpbacks, orcas, Steller sea lions, sea otters, pelagic birds, and myriad other species. It’s epic and it’s amazing. But we had to front $29,000 in boat fees to secure the dates for our workshop before we even sold one spot. This is just for the boats and captains. That doesn’t include their gratuities, which will be around 20% of that, too. We also had a $23,000 lodging bill to cover, with half down the day of booking and the other half due 90 days out.

It doesn’t matter how many times I do it, dropping $45,000 in deposits for a workshop before we’ve even sold one spot makes me nervous and queasy. You’re essentially gambling on selling out those workshop seats, which is especially nerve-racking when you’re launching a new location or just getting started.

In a high-tourism part of the world, like Alaska, boat tours and charters book anywhere from 12-24 months out. One place we’d like to use for a workshop can’t even accommodate the two of us to scout until 2024. So the earliest we may be able to offer a workshop there is 2025! If we are able to secure dates and offer a workshop here, it will be our most expensive workshop yet, which means our financial strategy has to include socking away profits enough to cover what will also be our most expensive set of deposits yet.

For this reason, I recommend starting out with workshops that are close to home or require little overhead. This helps you build up your profit margin to include a “bank” for future workshop deposits to draw from. It also helps you build up some name recognition in the workshop world as you grow, too.

Speaking Multiple Camera Languages

Most of us know our camera systems inside and out, but few of us can speak intelligently about the cameras of other brands. Being a wildlife photography workshop leader means becoming fluent in Canon, Nikon, Sony, and sometimes Olympus. I haven’t seen a Panasonic or Fuji on a workshop in the last few years, so I don’t really bother with keeping up on those unless a client specifically tells me they shoot with one of those systems.

One of the things we hear a lot from first-time workshop clients is that they’ve been on workshops before but their leader didn’t know how to help them because it was a different brand of camera. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’d be really freaking irritated if I dropped thousands of dollars to learn from someone and they couldn’t help me with some of the basics of my camera.

Both Jared and I are fluent in most of the DSLR and mirrorless systems from all of the major brands. It’s not that difficult once you get it down, but knowing the nomenclature of each brand helps you communicate specifically with each person and their camera system.

More than once, he and I have helped participants from another workshop with their cameras because they’ve overheard us teaching one of our clients something and their workshop leader wasn’t able to help them. We never want to make a fellow leader look bad, of course, but I’m also not going to leave a photographer frustrated on a trip of their lifetime because their workshop leader couldn’t be bothered to learn that Group AF on Nikon is called Zone AF on Canon and Sony.

Not only should you be able to assist a client with any brand of camera, you should be able to answer most of the commonly asked questions. In my experience, people most want to know how their autofocus systems work, but they also want to know a lot about the species being photographed. I answer more questions about animal habitat and behavior than I do anything else. Most people want to learn how to find these opportunities for themselves when they return home, so you need to be able to help answer all the “why/how” questions around the wildlife, too.

Scouting the Workshop

Every workshop-leading photographer handles the scouting of their workshops differently. Some don’t even scout at all - they simply hire third-party guides/companies to shuttle the group around when they get there. Personally, the thought of just showing up with clients and going out with a company I haven’t used before gives me heart palpitations.

Jared and I scouted our Kenai Fjords workshop that starts next week last year. The vendor Jared had gone out with in the past changed ownership and the new owners were not easy to work with. So we booked with another company and it ended up being a great thing we did. It’s rare that we find vendors who are as well-versed in the biology and ecology aspect of a trip as Jared and I. The vendor we ended up with blew us both away in that regard, in addition to being congenial guides and safe captains.

We liked their service and style so much that we redesigned the workshop a bit to make sure they could be our guides. This meant hiring out two boats instead of one, but it also means a much more intimate and personal experience for our clients. We can trust that we’ll have incredibly knowledgeable local guides who match the same “vibe” of how Jared and I run our workshops. This is enormous peace of mind especially when offering a new workshop for the first time.

For new workshops, personally scouting the year before also allows you to photograph images yourself for marketing the workshop. You’ll be able to speak intelligently about what to expect, what the atmosphere is like, and how things work because you’ve now experienced it yourself.

When Jared and I scouted this workshop, we did so with the intention of adding it to another Alaska workshop as an extension. Then we realized that we saw as much or more wildlife species and diversity in the three days on the boat than we did in our workshops to Yellowstone. Thus, we decided it was epic enough to be its own workshop and not just an extension.

This is the kind of insight and information you can’t get from simply copying the itinerary of another wildlife photography workshop or reading information on the website of another tour company. Both Jared and I are anxious enough before each workshop (this never goes away) trying to make sure that our clients are set up for the most success possible, the last thing we need to add to it is wondering if the vendor is going to be good, too.

For existing workshops we’ve done before, we always give ourselves at least a week of scouting the location ahead of time. Situations can vary greatly from year-to-year and it’s important to have time to create a contingency plan.

For example, we do winter in Yellowstone as a workshop every year. But this last year, we had to pivot. First we pivoted because there was an historic flood to the area, which changed everything about the northern range of the park. We didn’t even know if we’d be able to access it that winter; the updates from the National Park Service changed daily. So we decided to do the first part in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, instead.

But when Jared and I got to Jackson, everything fell apart. The area had received too much snow, sending the moose we aimed to photograph deep into the willows where they were no longer a photographable opportunity. We actually dive into this more in the next episode of the PhotoWILD Podcast, which comes out this coming Wednesday.

After 1500 miles of scouting, Jared and I had but ONE otter photo to show for it. The northern range ended up being workable after all, so we pivoted again and returned to our usual workshop routine.

It required a LOT of last-minute logistics reworking by yours truly here, but it was absolutely the right decision. One of our workshop-leading photographer colleagues was also scheduled to do half their workshop in Jackson, but they weren’t going to scout first. They were just showing up the day before their clients. We told them we were pivoting because we were seeing NOTHING there, but they decided to stay with the plan.

Lo and behold, their workshop group didn’t photograph anything but a fox in the distance for the entire first half of their trip. Of course we hate that it happened to our friend and their group, but it affirmed that we made the right choice. We had nothing but an epic year on the northern range.

The other major benefit to scouting early is a chance to make your own photography. We always need new images to market the workshop for the following year, but we also then have most of our photography out of the way. This makes us accessible and available for client questions and help.

While Jared and I do bring our cameras out with us on workshops, we try and only bring them out for something truly amazing or something we haven’t photographed ourselves. This is probably one of the things we get the most positive feedback about, too. At least once every workshop someone compliments us on how nice it is that we are always available to help.

Also, no one wants to feel like they paid for you to go on a photo trip. We hear this a lot from clients, too. They’ve been on other workshops and the leader(s) aren’t available so they feel like all they (the client) are doing is paying for the workshop leaders to make their own images. Ew. Gross.

There is no one right or wrong way to approach leading workshops. However, much like you need to figure out your “why” as a photographer, you need to decide your “why” as a workshop leader, too. You have to figure out your style, your specialty, and your own approach to delivering on your workshop promises.

In the next article, I’ll dive into some of the less sexy, but incredibly important, business parts of running workshops. So if you have any questions about this specific area of making money as a wildlife photographer, please feel free to send them in!