IN 2015, LITTLE DID WE KNOW THAT WE WOULD BE DOING THIS FOR 10 YEARS...
In late April 2015, about ten years and a couple of months ago from now, my wife Zeynep and I were going back home after running our first two Workshops, both in Scotland. Little did we know that 10 years later, again in late April, we would come home after 10 years leading Workshops and with 98 trips under our belt.
98 Workshops! Back in 2015, we had no idea we would get this far. Not only the 100 Workshop milestone is around the corner – if all goes well, we will reach it in September 2025 in Asturias – but as we always do, we also have published our full Workshops schedule for next year, with a few Sold Out already, and we are now planning our 2027 Workshop season.
Thinking about these 10 years took me back to all the Workshops we did, a pretty emotional experience for me. Sitting down, I enjoyed remembering all the wonderful photographic experiences, the people we met, the great times we had with them, as well as the difficult times we faced – Covid-19, just to name one thing – and the solutions we found for all the challenges life threw at us during this past decade.
I’d much rather look at a wonderful landscape, of course, but if I had to look at myself in the mirror after 10 years since starting our Vieri Bottazzini Workshops business, what I’d see would be a very different person. Yep, I am 10 years older, no way around that, my hairs are clearly greyer, and my beard is now nearly fully white, but that’s not the changes I am talking about (nor the changes I care to think about too much, for that matter!)
Besides the color of my hairs and beard, what changed during this decade is the amount of experience, expertise and knowledge I accumulated, both photographic and as a tutor. 98 Workshop is a huge number overall but looking back I couldn’t help but noticing the number of times we returned to all our destinations, which I find much more significant in many ways. From the top down, we went back to Cinque Terre & Tuscany 17 times (!), to Glencoe & Isle of Skye 13 times, to Iceland 12 times, to Death Valley 11 times, to the Dolomites 9 times, and so on.
Going back to places so many times brings with it a wonderful feeling of familiarity – not just with the photographic locations, something I find fundamental to create always better, deeper work – but with everything else as well. We feel at home at every hotel we stay, we know what to eat at each restaurant we go to, and most importantly we created friendships with people around the world that have been lasting for years now.
All that said, this milestone is not mine alone. Vieri Bottazzini Workshop is as much my doing as it is my wife Zeynep’s, and I couldn’t have done it without her and her help. Zeynep and I love doing what we do, and over this past decade we kept fine tuning the Workshops to make sure we offer you the best, most unique learning and photographic experience on the market. And we are definitely not done yet!
No matter how many Workshops we ran and how expert we became at doing this, Zeynep and I are constantly thinking about how to improve everything from logistics to the Workshops’ concept, from tutoring to our Portfolio of destinations and locations for each destination, so that they would be both inspiring and challenging.
Something we love to do, and that we do to make sure we offer the best and most rewarding experience to you, as well as the safest and most enjoyable one, is exploring in depth all the locations we will take you to, multiple times, before launching a Workshop.
To give you just an example, we just spent about a month in Ireland to finalize our new Workshop there – and we did that after starting photographing Ireland in 2013!
Speaking of new Workshops, besides keeping improving the ones we have, we are sticking to our plan of adding at least a new one to our Portfolio every year. In 2026 we scheduled our first Ireland group Workshop (already Sold Out, but there will be more!) and if all goes well, we will explore Portugal, which we will add in 2027.
As well, starting 2027 we are planning on adding a completely new kind of Workshop, something absolutely innovative and unique, which will be launched soon.
On a (seemingly) more geeky side, to celebrate our first 10 years of Workshops I just finished a full recoding of our VIERI BOTTAZZINI WORKSHOPS website, and while its looks will look familiar to those of you who visited it already, everything under the hood is brand new!
Thanks to this technology update, the website is now much, much faster and nimbler. Of course, while I was at it, I revised and updated all texts, and I also uploaded our 2024-2025 Workshop Reports (all 14 of them!) so you can now enjoy our Alumni’s Testimonials and images for these amazing trips as well.
As many of you know, we do all this as a two-person operation, and we are proud of taking care personally of all the details. No outsourcing Workshops to other instructors, no going to locations we don’t know, no relying on third party services for anything, and so on.
For us, this is a huge commitment, a huge investment of time and resources and a huge workload – just think about all the bureaucracy involved in running Workshops in 8 different countries! – but at the same time it’s the only way we can be sure of the results and keep the quality of what we do as high as we want it.
To give you a better idea of what we did during these first 10 years of Vieri Bottazzini Workshops, let me share a few numbers with you:
– 10 years & 98 Workshops so far
– 3 people maximum attendance and yet 135+ Alumni so far
– 9.92/10 Alumni rating
– 58% returning Alumni, of which 1 x 10 times, 2 x 9 times and so on, so far
– 16 destinations in 8 countries so far
It is the two of us who did all this over these 10 years, that’s true – but we couldn’t have done it without you!
So, let me close today’s reflections over 10 years of Vieri Bottazzini Workshops with a huge THANK YOU to all of you that supported us and joined us on one or more of our trips. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to have you with us, and we can’t wait to welcome you onboard for 10 more years of great photography, landscapes and camaraderie!
Thank you for reading this post, I hope you enjoyed it! Why don’t you share it with your friends, or drop me a comment to let me know your thoughts about this?