Kenya is a country of staggering ecological range. Within a span of a two-week trip, you can photograph rhinos against a modern city skyline, wade into a herd of elephants with the silhouette of Kilimanjaro rising behind them, sit concealed in a waterhole in a conservancy with exclusive, front-row access, and finish the journey watching red-dusted elephants move through lava rock and thornbrush in one of Eat Africa’s most geologically dramatic landscapes. Each one of the locations we’ll be photographing has its own light, its own particular cast of characters, and each one will keep you in awe behind the viewfinder.

Kenya has occupied a place in the imagination of wildlife photographers for generations, and for a very good reason. The diversity of megafauna here is matched only in a handful of places on this great planet of ours. The landscapes shift dramatically over short distances. The interplay between conservation and community has produced some of the most thoughtfully managed wildlife areas anywhere. This workshop is designed around those realities, and built in partnership with photographers and travel journalists Michael Hodgson and Therese Iknoian, and structured to take you into places and situations that many itineraries never even reach.

Our workshop begins at one of the more ecologically improbably places on earth: Nairobi National Park. The unfenced southern boundary of this park allows wildlife to move freely between the open plains and the city just beyond the fence line, creating a landscape where critically endangered black rhinos, lions, leopards, buffalo, giraffe, zebra, and more than 500 species of birds operate in the shadow of a metropolitan area of five million people. This is a photographic situation that exists nowhere else on earth: genuine, unfenced African wildlife with a modern skyline as a backdrop. That juxtaposition isn’t incidental to the photograph. It is the photograph.

From Nairobi, we’ll travel south to Amboseli, where the itinerary’s most iconic visual comes into focus: elephants beneath Kilimanjaro. The Amboseli Elephant Research Project is one of the longest-running large mammal research programs in the world, and the elephants that move through the park’s wetlands and floodplains are among the most extensively studied in the world. With Africa’s highest peak rising 19,341 feet on the southern horizon, the photographic conditions here are close to ideal as wildlife photography gets. Three full days, with morning and evening drives calibrated to the light rather than a scheduled, gives us time to work this incredible landscape properly.

The heart of the trip is a place most Kenya itineraries never visit. The Lumo Conservancy is a community-run wildlife area managed in partnership between the local Taita people and conservation stakeholders on the border of Tsavo West. The wildlife is genuine, the experiences is intimate, and best of all, the crowds are not here.

For three consecutive nights, we have exclusive use of a dedicated photography hide overlooking a waterhole deep inside the conservancy. This kind of access is genuinely rare, and the hide changes the photographic dynamic completely. Animals approach on their own terms. Predators hunt. Prey animals drink without alarm. Birds land close enough to fill the frame. The images made from a well-placed hide are categorically different than anything we’ll make from the vehicles. What shows up on any given night is unknown, and that uncertainty is half the gift.

While half the group works the hide each night with Michael Hodgson, the other half is outside with Therese Iknoian under some of the darkest skies in East Africa. The Lumo Conservancy sits near the equator, and that geographic fact changes what is available to a night sky photographer. Kenya's dry season keeps the air clear and the humidity low. The night sky program at Lumo is not a way to fill the hours between sessions in the hide. It is a serious and structured photographic opportunity led by one of the most accomplished night sky photographers in the field.

We close out this trip in Tsavo West, part of the largest national park complex in Kenya. Tsavo’s elephants are immediately recognizable: they roll in the park’s iron-rich laterite soil and turn a stunning burnt sienna color, unlike anything encountered in Amboseli. Lava flows, Chyulu Hills, and dense acacia thornbrush define a landscape that is visually and ecologically distant from every other part of our trip thus far. The park’s lion population is historically significant and well-documented. It’s a fitting final chapter to a trip that has moved through four completely different versions of Kenya.

The wildlife images in the gallery have been provided by co-leader, Michael Hodgson. Night sky photography provided by co-leader Therese Iknoian.