Safaris where the hunt is for the perfect picture

The golden light was falling on the Mojave Desert, but no matter where Alberto Zanella pointed his fancy new camera, the rusting chemical tanks looked like an orange blur. He tried steadying the camera by kneeling on the sand, to no avail. Then he tried fidgeting with the autofocus mode, but wasn't sure how — the manual was back at the hotel.

Happily, a photography teacher was by his side. "He told me to lower my aperture," said Zanella, 30, from Bethesda, Maryland, who was using a Nikon D80, a digital single-lens-reflex camera he bought over the holidays. To learn how to operate it, he flew cross-country to join other amateur photographers for a weekend class. "This gives me an excuse to shoot."

Taking photos while traveling used to be an afterthought, like airport souvenirs. But thanks to the boom in digital cameras, vacation photos have proliferated like spam. There's no film to waste, no Fotomats to visit and oodles more pictures to clog e-mail inboxes. But are those pictures any good?

A growing number of shutterbugs seem to think not, and that has given rise to a popular new trend in travel: photography safaris. Combining guided tours to exotic locales with hands-on instruction, photo safaris seek to turn the everyday Ofoto user into a budding Ansel Adams.

"They are a huge and growing market," said Reid Callanan, the director of Sante Fe Workshops (www.santafeworkshops.com), a photography school that offers dozens of tours every year, including a seven-day workshop in Tuscany with National Geographic photographers. "Everybody and their brother, most major photo magazines and many photographers are doing them."

Workshop regulars rave about the camaraderie. Everybody is there to take pictures and talk shop. And thanks to the immediacy of digital photography, there are daily critique sessions, giving students instant feedback on their work. Students are not only escorted to postcard-ready spots, but are taught how to take postcard-perfect shots.

That was the idea anyway in January, when about 30 amateur photographers gathered near Barstow, California, along a tumbledown stretch of Route 66 in the Mojave Desert. Unlike most photo safaris, which are held in conventionally photogenic places like Paris or Bhutan, the focus was the rotting architecture, corroded salt flats and black volcanic craters that litter this desert landscape. "We are photographing the disappearance of the industrial age," said Dave Wyman, a freelance photographer who ran the three-day safari.

Friday began at Tom's, a welding and machine shop with a surrounding junkyard, on the north fringes of town.

Arriving in a caravan of SUVs and minivans, the students fanned out like wolves under the low desert sun, poking their lenses into rusty antique cars, spying shadows on scrap metal and sniffing through detritus for photo ops. The students came prepared. Camera bags were stuffed with lenses, memory cards, assorted filters and spare batteries. Many brought along tripods, including one gentleman who flew all the way from England to photograph what he called the "real America." A few wore flak jackets, as if on assignment.

Unlike so many snap-happy tourists, no one was in a rush to leave. They took their sweet time, calibrating their angles and peeling back the visual layers like an onion. "Turn everything into an abstract," said Richard Nolthenius, an astronomer from Santa Cruz, California, as he studied a pile of rusty metal parts.