Most photography tours are built around getting you to a famous subject, in a famous place, and pointing you at it. Congratulations, you’ve just made the same image as everyone else in your camera club. While there is nothing wrong with recreating iconic images, Field & Frame workshops are designed to help you understand your subjects and the natural world in a deeper way. You’ll learn about the animal and the behavior you’re observing and how it helps you anticipate what will happen next. That’s what helps put you in the right place, at the right distance, and facing the right direction when the moment arrives. You’ll get all the technical instruction you want, too. It just isn’t the whole picture.
Every workshop is led by Field & Frame founder Annalise Kaylor, a professional wildlife and conservation photographer, master birder, and former bird guide whose work has appeared in Audubon, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BBC Discover Wildlife, to name a few. Most of the workshops take place in locations she’s worked many times over the years, in areas she knows intimately.
On a few trips, such as our Kenya workshops, she’s joined by co-leaders whose expertise adds something specific to the itinerary.
No. Our groups regularly include photographers who are a year into the craft alongside people who have been shooting for decades. What they share is curiosity and a willingness to slow down. Because groups are small, instruction meets you where you are: one person may be working on exposure in mixed light while another is refining composition or anticipating behavior. Everyone leaves a better photographer than they arrived, and nobody gets left behind.
With six photographers, there’s time to look at your back-of-camera images, talk through what’s working, and adjust before the light changes. Expect conversations about settings and composition, but also about wind direction, alarm calls, and why the animal you’re working with is behaving the way he or she is. Some photographers prefer a lot of instruction and feedback, while others prefer a more hands-off experience. How much instruction you’d like is entirely up to you.
As a general rule, no. We don’t build group post-processing sessions into our workshops. Everyone approaches editing differently, with different methods, different software, and different ideas about what “best” looks like. In our experience, a group session tends to leave beginners overwhelmed or too embarrassed to share their work, and more advanced photographers frustrated by the slower pace.
Instead, Annalise is happy to help one-on-one when the itinerary allows for it, though on most workshops the schedule doesn’t leave room. Otherwise, we save image review and post-processing as a backup plan for days when inclement weather keeps us out of the field.
Most of our departures are limited to six photographers, though some cap at just three plus Annalise. Fewer people in the field means quieter approaches, no jockeying for position, and plenty of unobstructed space to photograph on either side of our safari vehicles and boats. Fewer photographers also means the animals are under less pressure, which is better for them and, not coincidentally, better for the photographs.
We build each itinerary around a season and a behavior rather than a checklist: puma cubs emerging on the Patagonian steppe in spring, waterfowl at the height of breeding season in the Prairie Potholes, muskox settling after the rut on autumn tundra, vibrant with color. Then we look for partners who share our standards: local guides and lodges that treat wildlife with respect, keep their economic impact local, and can give us access most groups never get, from private estancias to exclusive photography hides.
Unlike many companies, which just book with a partner and send a guide into a location sight unseen, Annalise actually scouts each location, operator, and potential workshop at least a year in advance to ensure a high-quality experience.
Good fieldcraft and ethical fieldcraft turn out to be built from the same skill set. The photographer who understands animals well enough to read their behavior is also the one making the better frame, from farther away, without ruining the encounter for the animal or the next person who comes along.
We do not bait or lure animals, though some of the bird workshops do have the typical bird feeder setups with fruit, nectar, and seeds. We do not allow for baiting of raptors on our workshops. We don’t chase wildlife or come up with ways to elicit a reaction we want to photograph. We read stress signals and back off when we see them, and we don’t crowd dens or nest sites, situations where the animals are already even more vulnerable.
If you have any questions about how we plan to photograph specific species and how we see and work with them naturally, please ask. Ethical wildlife photography workshop leaders are always happy to be fully transparent about the experience.
Wildlife photography comes with no guarantees. What we can do is stack the odds in our favor: we time every trip to the season when the animals are most active and visible, we work with local experts who track them daily, and we build extra time into the itinerary so one quiet morning doesn’t define the trip. And some of the most memorable days are the ones where we learn the most about how to find them.
