Would love to hear of trips you've taken that are specific to photo tours. I've just taken a few and have a few planned. (and what tour companies do you use?)

Was in Alaska in February for a northern lights tour - went all the way to Coldfoot Camp.

Have just returned from Patagonia (both Argentina and Chile) for a landscape tour.

Thinking about doing some Milky Way stuff and trying to decide where to go -

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yeah. so a bummer that the moderators moved this here. Don't think this forum gets much traffic. argh.

I haven't done any photo tours, though at one time I collected a lot of links to them.

I listen to photography podcasts and they often have on people who offer these photo workshops. They typically put the packages together, lodgings, some meals and ground transportation with specific actinides like outings to go to some photo spots.

You are paying for their knowledge of certain places, the best photo spots there, as well as their photographic knowledge and experience.

So you would expect their packages to cost more than if you booked a comparable trip with hotels and meals. But the price difference seemed really high, so you were paying thousands more for however many sessions you'd have with these famous photographers during the trip, how many outings they'd organized.

Certainly possible that the value-add could be worth it but ideally, I'd like to book my own tour and then do one or two workshops to see if it had value for me, so I never booked any of these.

Some bigger companies also have photo tour packages, like National Geographic and some other fancy tour operators like OAS. I just couldn't see paying those prices. They would have at least doubled what I typically spend on a international trip on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

The other thing is on Viator and GetYourGuide.com, you sometimes get photographer tours, again a kind of individual operator taking you to places he knows about. Those aren't cheap either, like a couple hundred for 2-4 hours. In those cases, they're not known photographers, certainly not those who appear on podcasts or have fancy websites with some portion of their portfolios. So I just often Google photo spots in Nice or wherever. There are some apps which also collect photos uploaded by users of certain places, along with their GPS coordinates and photos. I also look at photos posted to Google Maps, to see what certain places look like.

Google shut down Panoramio a few years ago, which I used to view to get ideas of what kind of photos people took at certain places I was visiting, again down to the exact locations where they geotagged their photos.

Clearly you need some sort of "dark sky" reserve far from light and air pollution. We are fortunate to have visited a few, admittedly more by accident than design. We have always been blown away by what you can actually see in these places.

Places that immediately spring to mind are Mount Cook and Mount John on Lake Tekapo in New Zealand - not sure about tours but both have night sky guides that can take you through the process of photographing the stars. There is an observatory atop Mount John. In addition to the Milky Way and night skies, New Zealand is arguably the most photogenic country we have visited on are travels as far as landscapes are concerned. a more accessible and compact version of Patagonia.

San Pedro de Atacama in Chile is big on astronomy and photo tours and is easily combined with Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia which is where we got the very best views of the Milky Way - a combination of being many miles from any development and at an altitude of over 4000 metres, the air is very thing and very clear.

Yeah I spent a couple of nights in Lake Tekapo.

I didn't go to the observatory, where they will connect your camera (with interchangeable lens) to their telescope and take pictures for you but I took some pics, not of the Milky Way but the stars above the lake.

There's a famous little church by the lake and people photograph the stars above it too.

In general I don't do astro because you have to drive like 50-75 miles away from big city or metropolitan areas to get away from light pollution.

I only did it in Lake Tekapo because I could set up my tripod outside the apt. that I was staying in.

My favorite "dark sky" place is the Pine Mountain Observatory 20+ miles SE of Bend Oregon. The main telescope and the grounds are run by the University of Oregon. There are several other telescopes and you are welcome to set up your own with a camera attached. You don't have to hire anyone to take you there. There is a long dirt/gravel road to get up there. There is a dry campground if you wanted to spend some time up there.

An easy "do it yourself" tour that can include some great astrophotography is a loop out of Portland, Oregon that includes the Columbia River Gorge with all its waterfalls, Mount Hood and the glorious Hood River Valley, and stops at Goldendale Observatory State Park (with its public-access telescope) across the Columbia in Washington, followed by the strange copy of Stonehenge at Maryhill (WA) and the very cool little Maryhill Museum of Art, set atop the cliffs over the great river. Google the places on this map - https://goo.gl/maps/AQpsEo3qi1pgHpZ87

(Not my pictures)

Wow great suggestions there. My main thing is having to travel far from where I would stay, in the middle of the night. Then dealing with animals.