Mark S. Peterson Photography offers award-winning fine-art nature, landscape and travel photography, editorial and commercial imaging, graphic design and art direction, portraits and weddings, photography workshops and photo tours. My work regularly appears in magazines and national ad campaigns, is exhibited in galleries across the US Midwest, and is found in private and corporate art collections across the US and in Europe.

This blog will keep you up to date on my dynamic team's diverse range of projects, news, and photo tips, and will provide insights into our work. Thanks for visiting - enjoy!



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  • Archive: ‘Travel’



    2011 Autumn Color Workshops

    Sunday, September 11th, 2011

    Our popular annual Autumn Color photography workshops are fast approaching – and there are still spots available. This year we are expanding the Midwest Nature Photography Field Workshops fall color events to include another fabulous Iowa location – Wildcat Den State Park!

    Saturday, October 15, we’ll be offering our one-day field workshop at the gorgeous Wildcat Den State Park, near Muscatine, Iowa. This lovely state park is conveniently located about 30-minutes West of Davenport, 1 hour Southeast of Iowa City, or 2 hours 40 minutes East of Des Moines. It features a variety of fabulous nature photography subjects, and a historic stream-side mill.

    Sunday, October 23, we’ll then be returning to the beautiful Ledges State Park in Boone County (about 30 minutes North of Des Moines) for another one-day field workshop. The Ledges has been a highly productive workshop location for us in past years! This park’s mix of prairie, cliffs, and deep valley streams make a marvelous location for our workshop participants. Central Iowa photographers won’t want to miss this opportunity to shoot with us!

    The itinerary for each Autumn Color workshop begins early, with a quick pre-dawn get-acquainted meeting, and then we move right into a very packed day of hands-on photography, creating beautiful fall color photographs until dusk!

    Topics covered include both basic and advanced topics of outdoor nature photography, including exposure, selective focus, composition, proper field technique, numerous creative techniques, equipment and gear, and much more.  Our experienced instructors are hands-on and do not shoot their own images in the field; rather, they focus 100% of their efforts on assisting participants to learn proper technique and to create fantastic images. Our goal is to help you return from the field at the end of the day with a collection of publication-quality autumn color photographs including landscapes, close-up or macro images, and evocative artistic images.

    Our Autumn Color one-day field workshops generally sell out and have a waiting list! We keep group size small to ensure plentiful individual attention and to allow the group to move from location to location in the park without difficulty. If interested in joining us for one or both days, please contact us right away for more information and to reserve your spot! Please note that our workshops are targeted at SLR users – digital or film.

    For more information, please see this link. For questions or to register, please contact us right away! Registrants will receive complete itinerary, details of the day, packing list, and a list of recommended nearby hotels, prior to the event.

    As always, thanks for your interest in the Midwest Nature Photography Field Workshop Series. See you in the Field!

    View from the Frog Bleachers

    Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

    Recently, I visited one of my favorite “soul places,” a beautiful local park with a lovely natural pond area.  The pond is full of frogs of several varieties, including very large bullfrogs.  Located over part of the pond, are some covered, tiered benches on a platform – the platform is sort of a dock over the water, and the tiered benches are not unlike those in a (very) small sports stadium.

    This location is an extremely peaceful place: there are few visitors most days, and the sounds are merely those of the water, of course the frogs, insects, and birds. It’s one of those places that is fabulous to reflect, to think, to be inspired by nature, or perhaps to share quiet time or even mark a special occasion with someone special.

    Recently, I’ve been inspired to refer to the tiered benches at the pond as “The Frog Bleachers.”  Here’s a recent image created there, which I call simply “View from the Frog Bleachers.” Enjoy!

    Halloween at Granary Burying Ground, Boston

    Saturday, October 30th, 2010

    Finding myself in Boston a few days before Halloween, it seemed an appropriate time to visit an historic graveyard.  So I stopped in at the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street.  The Granary Burying Ground is noted as being one of the oldest graveyards in Boston (it’s not the oldest, but rather the third oldest), founded in 1660. But it’s the final resting place of many Boston notables, such as Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, several other signers of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Sewell (the Salem witch trials judge), some members of Ben Franklin’s Family, and the victims of the Boston Massacre.

    The day was warm, rainy, humid, dank, and overcast…a perfect day for making some moody photographs in one of the nation’s oldest cemetaries.  I played with some long exposures, and did some lightpainting with my little keychain LED light.

    Here are a few of my favorites.  Enjoy, and Happy Halloween!


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