As the sun straddled the horizon, the class moved to the old Barstow train station, clicking away as freight trains screeched by on the steel tracks. Blurry shots became even blurrier as the sun went down and the moon rose.
It wasn't until dinner, at a scrappy Mexican restaurant in town, that the group began to socialize and explain why they came. "I bought a camera two years ago, but I don't know how to use it," said Charlene Gerrish, 61, a painter from Carmel, California. "I normally use a point-and-shoot, but I'm trying to graduate to this camera — a Canon D20 or something."
Others were technically proficient, even nerdy. "You can learn through a book, but here you can share ideas," said Kevin Burke, 56, a retired government employee from Las Vegas. "I shoot every day, but I wanted to go out with like-minded photo geeks."
He had plenty of company. Dinner conversation revolved around such topics as shooting in JPEG or RAW, when to use a polarizing filter, whether Canon is superior to Nikon and, the perennial favorite, PC versus Mac. The art of photography, "when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality," as Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, seemed to be beside the point.
After dinner, the group retired to the Holiday Inn Express, which is about as nice as hotels get in Barstow. Not that students expected much. The cost of the photo safari — including tuition, lodging, dinner and a guest lecturer, Ken Rockwell, who runs a popular photography Web site — was only US$375.
There are, of course, much fancier photo safaris out there. National Geographic Expeditions, for example, runs a seven-day workshop in Venice that costs US$4,870, and Joseph Van Os Photo Safaris, based in Vashon Island, Washington, has a photography workshop in Antarctica that starts at US$11,795 and includes a crew of 10 nature photographers, naturalists and wildlife biologists.
But picking a photo safari is not just about price. There's a difference between photo workshops, which are structured around formal lessons, and photo tours, where the teacher basically chaperones tourists around to various Kodak Moments. The Mojave safari fell into the latter category.
Saturday was another picture-perfect day, with an eerie morning fog hugging the barren desert. Much of the afternoon was spent darting from one quirky attraction to the next: a town cemetery, the Baghdad Cafe, an abandoned gas station, the Pisgah Volcano, a pigeon-infested motel and a mom-and-pop chemical factory. It was a journey back in time, somewhere between the industrial and atomic ages.
After a dinner of burgers and beer, the class reconvened at the Holiday Inn Express, turning the lobby into a makeshift classroom. Computer displays were hooked up. Laptops were plugged in. Despite having no time to edit the day's shoot, several people volunteered to show their work.
Some were quite good, eliciting oohs and aahs from envious students. What lens did you use? Where was that taken? How did you do that? But most were unremarkable — a pretty sunset, a cute dog — and illustrated the enormous gap between a snapshot and a photograph.
Still, the students were eager to see more, perhaps to feel better about their own pictures. But no one else was offering. "I don't think so," said Marcee Chipman, 59, a lawyer from San Diego. "Not unless you want to see all 500 of mine."
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