High Road to Taos Photography Tour/Workshop

Join us for a day of photography exploring the Native and Hispanic villages along the High Road to Taos. We’ll visit Penasco, Las Trampas, and Truchas—each with its own distinct character, adobe churches, weathered textures, and timeless charm. These historic villages offer a rich blend of culture, architecture, and landscape that lend themselves beautifully to the camera’s eye.

On the return drive to Taos, we’ll take our time photographing in the soft, late-day light through the scenic valley of Llano de San Juan—the landscape made famous by John Nichols in The Milagro Beanfield War. This stretch of Northern New Mexico is pure visual poetry, where light and land seem to speak their language.

Throughout the day, we’ll explore a range of photographic techniques—from working with natural light and composing landscapes and architecture, to exposure, metering, and interpreting histograms. Whether you’re shooting manually or using auto settings, we’ll cover what works best for your style. There’s also time for multiple image panoramas, and in-the-field image reviews and critiques to help you grow as a photographer.

I look forward to sharing this magical land with you—the people, the stories, and the extraordinary beauty of Northern New Mexico.

“In Thanksgiving week 1984 I made my first of many trips to New Mexico. On this occasion, five of us friends set out on a foggy morning from Santa Fe and made our way north on the high road to Taos. The sites and sounds on the streets of Santa Fe soon opened up to the immense vistas of mesas, and beyond to the Taos Volcanic Plateau.

“We passed through the village of Chimayo climbing the hill to Truchas (Spanish for Trout). Rapidly gaining elevation the landscape changed to pristine hills of ponderosa pines and rust-colored tones of scrub oak in the undergrowth. Bare white highlights of lanky aspen, punctuated the vast square miles of pine trees in the Carson National Forrest. Through the misty veil of condensation on the window, we were afforded more than a subtle hint of what autumn in the high country of New Mexico might have looked like one month earlier.

“Leaving Truchas for Penasco, the fog set in. The temperature dropped in the sparsely populated, mountain communities of Las Trampas and Picuris. The colder air outside the car became magically enhanced from the aroma of piñon and juniper burning in the fireplaces of scattered homes. At this very moment… sometimes you just know it, the mystery of things unknown and northern New Mexico took a very palpable hold on me.

“Not more than four years later, in the spring of 1988 that hold tightened and I moved to a small adobe building, with two fireplaces, in Talpa, NM and began stockpiling five cords of wood for what promised to be a cold winter that year…