I have been lucky enough to travel the world alongside a beautiful woman. In fact, I’ve traveled the world solely because of that beautiful woman! And here’s the thing about going on walkabouts and traveling the world, it’s AMAZING!!! It’s life changing! With that being said, earlier this year, I had an amazing opportunity to travel to one of the most beautiful places in the world, that just so happens to be in America! If you follow Nicole and I on instagram (@nicolehberg/@kevkberg), you know that back in May I had an amazing adventure into Yosemite National Park. My good friend and amazing photographer, Mark Eric, had texted me and a few other photographers about attending a nighttime workshop in Yosemite. I love taking nighttime images so of course I wanted to go! As the plans started to fall into place, it began to look as just a guys trip, so my lovely wife told me it was ok to go and have fun without her, as long as I promised to take her in the near future. (And, yes, we are currently planning the return trip!)

As it was going to be just the guys, this trip then became known as “Brosemite” and included myself, Mark Eric, Brandon O’Neal, and Adam Hudson. I would be remiss if I did not say that these guys are all amazing photographers and even better people. I don’t think there was more than a few seconds when we weren’t laughing or sharing stories that doubled us over in laughter!!! The worst part of this trip was that my time was so limited. Another day or two would have really been nice. I was only able to fly in for the workshop as we had a wedding the weekend after the workshop but the other guys were going to have a few extra days to explore. I flew into Fresno and made the drive to Yosemite from there while the other guys flew into San Francisco. The drive from Fresno was very pleasant and beautiful. Add in that I rented and thoroughly enjoyed a few burnouts in a Camaro and it was a pretty epic drive in! I did get a bit nervous, though, as there is almost no cell reception, so there was no missing a turn because my phone’s GPS couldn’t recalculate without a signal! Somehow I made it safely to the hotel, although I was missing my navigator (Nicole) the whole time and subsequently did miss a few turns! The hotel was spread out and I became concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find the guys as my cell phone had no reception at the hotel either! Luckily, the guys were in the lobby right as I was walking into the hotel lobby so I wasn’t knocking on random doors looking for them. We stayed at the Yosemite View Lodge, which was a nice place to stay albiet the restaurants had very odd hours. The first night we all hungout on the balcony enjoying our view of the river and mountains and messed around with a few long exposures.

The next morning, we woke up and headed into Yosemite Valley. The workshop we were attending didn’t start until 1 p.m., so we had some time to explore. Right away, I knew this was going to be a great trip! We made one quick stop along the road for pictures before we stopped and admired Yosemite falls! This was just such an amazingly beautiful spot! (I’ll add in that on our recent trip to Disney we rode Soarin’ at Epcot Center. Soarin’ is a hang-gliding simulation ride that takes you over parts of California. One particular clip has a beautiful waterfall with people climbing a cliff and it was then that I about lost it as I realized for the first time ever I recognized Yosemite falls! Totally changed the ride experience for me!!!) We stopped and walked around taking in the views and snapping a few images!

I caught Mark in the middle of a selfie!

After playing around, we headed back to the hotel for the start of the workshop. Our first stop was a meadow and then we headed towards a beautiful lake! I’ve included this first image to show that, in the middle of May, there were still large piles of snow all around certain parks of Yosemite!

Sometimes an iphone selfie isn’t enough so, while I happened to be away from the group in an isolated area, I setup the auto-timer for a big camera shot of myself!

A few of the images that are included in this blog are iphone images…this next image is an iphone shot of me showing of my cool camera harness, the moneymaker. I’ll tell ya what…this strap is not only good looking…its super functional and is a great way to carry your camera on vacation! Plus, its one of my favorite things to instagram!

We made another stop along the way at this next little area. This place was covered in snow! In fact, one or two of us may have sunk waist deep in snow!

We did see a bear in the woods on our second day in Yosemite. It was a pretty comical experience in the car when Mark spotted the bear and we all began to shout at Brandon to turn the car around so we could try to spot the bear again. I’m pretty sure that’s the exact opposite of what you should do when you see a bear, but anything for the shot right?!?!?! I’m not sure if he was smarter than the average bear, but, by the time we turned the car around to get a second look, he was long gone.

This next image may not look like much, but I took it to show what a human looks like while walking on this mountain. A little to the right of dead center of the image is a person sitting down. We watched that person hiking for a bit and were all pretty impressed! While watching this hiker, we were stopped at a little rest area and I noticed this awesome Volkswagon van. Considering I grew up riding in a red Volkswagon van, I had to snap a shot of it!

This is a picture I snapped of Adam at Tuolumne Meadows. This trip was my first time meeting Adam but it took about five minutes to feel like we were old friends.

Our last stop of the day was for sunset photos of Half-Dome. It was a bit of a walk from where we parked the car to the area we were all setting up to photograph Half-Dome at sunset, so I made sure to snap images along the way!

I’ve seen the image that Brandon took while I was snapping this image of him, and it’s pretty amazing!

I was having a great time climbing on rocks and hanging off ledges while taking pictures. In fact I took a good bit of time when I just sat feet dangling off the ledge soaking up the scenery. Sometimes it’s important to be in the moment and truly soak in what you are experiencing and not worry about getting “the shot.” While I enjoyed my ledge, Brandon snapped this image of me taking a picture of Half-Dome.

We left the park and went back to the hotel for dinner before we were to head back into the park for night time images. Well, it was a pretty long ride back to the hotel and, when we returned to the hotel at 9:15 p.m., both restaurants were closed. That left us all getting frozen burritos/hamburgers/etc to enjoy before heading back into Yosemite. Wait, that doesn’t have enough build up. We had breakfast that morning at like 9 a.m. and, since then, no real food had been consumed despite our hiking several miles and spending a full day in the sun. We were all starving and the prospect of a frozen burrito…well, it was disappointing to say the least. After about an hour break, we loaded back onto the bus and headed into the park for night time pics. This next image is my best recreation of the third picture in this blog, but at night.

Now I’ll be completely honest, I was so excited about this workshop and shooting nighttime images of Yosemite that all day I was just dying for the sun to go down and the stars to come out! Alas, this is where disappointment came in relation to this workshop. We spent an hour taking nighttime pictures at a workshop called “Yosemite After Dark.” Yeah, at the Yosemite After Dark Workshop, we spent 6 hours out in the day and one at night. I shoot star trails that take twice that long to fully capture so I was not very happy. There were several other factors that contributed to this workshop being a disaster, but the limited night shooting was by far the worst to me. However, I was able to get a decent star trail picture that night before moving to a second location where I was able to get just a hint of a trail.

The next morning we decided to not join the worshop for the second day and to just venture out into Yosemite on our own. Considering how much fun the four of us had prior to the workshop and how limiting the workshop was on us, it was definitely the right call. So we rested up and went in search of lunch. Did I mention the restaurants had weird hours? Yeah, they weren’t open for lunch. So we drove down to another hotel where we enjoyed lunch and shared stories…seriously funny stories. After eating, we stopped at a local store and grabbed some PB&J fixings as we planned to stay in the park for the rest of the day and capture as many images as possible! We had one major thing we all wanted to do that day and it was to see some magestic trees. We made our way to the Mariposa Grove stopping along the way at some breath taking views.

This next image may not look that impressive alone…but add in some perspective and things change! I snapped an image of Adam photographing the tree stump as perspective and, for fun, included an iphone pic of me! (Keep in mind I’m over 6′ tall!!!)

I’ve included this next image as a sad example that yes you do see the damage from wildfires. It’s sad to hear of the current wildfire that is ongoing at Yosemite. Yes, it’s part of nature’s way to allow for regrowth, but the thought of losing any part of this amazingly beautiful place is terrible.

After the trees, we made our way to Glacier Point for sunset…but, right before we hit Glacier Point, we saw a great place to stop as the sun was setting on Half-Dome so we jumped out and made our last stop of the day. I was hoping to shoot some nighttime images from this location but it was cloudy and you couldn’t see many stars at all. But we did get some great pics of Half-Dome!

While we didn’t get much service at the hotel, the service in the middle of Yosemite was pretty great! I made sure to send Nicole a picture or one of my video tours of Yosemite as often as possible since she misses me soooo much when I’m gone!

It was an amazing trip. I very much enjoyed the scenery and majesty of it all, but what I enjoyed the most was spending time with some pretty awesome friends. I look forward to Brosemite II: the Photographers Strike Back! Now I saved the best pic for last and it’s not even mine…as you would expect four pretty awesome photographers would do, we captured an epic, and I do mean EPIC, group photo!!!