Photo by Joe Reiffer

This should be one of the highlights of this year’s night photography season: Troy Paiva and Joe Reiffer’s excellent Mojave junkyard adventure. It will take place September 10-12.

The workshop includes 3 afternoons of technique discussions, critiques, and post-processing demos. After the classroom sessions it’s off to the junkyard for 3 nights of shooting and hands-on instruction with light painting wizard Troy Paiva and night photography expert Joe Reifer. The workshop page has links to photos by Troy, Joe, and past workshop participants: http://www.joereifer.com/#/Workshops/

3 afternoons of instruction and 3 nights of shooting at Paul’s Junkyard. Sign up now!

There are many gulls who live and nest on the island and all through the night you could hear their screeching along with the roar of the surf against the rocks.

more images will be posted on the Flickr group site.

The portfolio section uses a gallery plugin that makes flash galleries, but also works on an ipad or an i-phone. so that holds promise for expanding photographer’s websites into the WordPress domain.

Pardon me for not enabling comments! I simply don’t have the time to sift through the spam and while I do plan to blog regularly, I am not a Blogger per se. But who knows, that might change. For now I plan to do regular updates on this website.  Stay tuned and I welcome your comments.

Please email me at sanne@sanneart.com

The kids loved the show and squealed in delight when the performers “ate” the fire. I was impressed by their agility and grace and the fact that no-one got hurt.

The fire artists are Erin St. Blaine and her husband Darrell who can be hired for parties at their website firepixie.com

Steve taught night photography at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco from 1979 to 1990. Among his students were several who went on to become quite well-known as photographers in their own right, namely Tom Paiva, Tim Baskerville and Lance Keimig.

They are among the founding member of The Nocturnes, a group of photographers who dedicated themselves to night photography and brought this medium to the masses.

Before Steve became a photographer he made a name for himself as a model in Manhattan and stood in front of the lenses of such luminaries a Diane and Alan Arbus, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon.

Among the birthday guests were Tom Paiva, Troy Paiva, Andy Frazer and Joe Reifer. John Chin, a former student of Steve’s was the oldest at 94.

The special present for Steve was a book of images featuring the work of a select group of Nocturnes and some of the iconic images that Steve himself has produced.

Tom Paiva has a great gallery of pictures from the event. Steve said it was the best birthday he ever had.

You can look at Steve Harpers work at www.steveharperphotography.com

It was the second time for me. I went early, around 4 pm and as usual there were already packs of photographers at the choice spots to wait until dusk. It was a clear day and warm. I ran onto sevral people I knew from the last event.

This time I came armed with my Nikon D700. Two years ago I had a D80 and realized that to get a really good quality image of this, I needed a full-frame sensor.

It was a great learning experience. I am so in awe of how Tom manages to make every shot he takes a work of art, even of the most mundane subject matter. He works precisely and methodically, while I play. I have come to accept that everyone has their own way of working and  I will never be that type of photographer. But I do try to slow down and go through my mental checklist of things to consider. Here is a link to some of Tom’s images of that outing