For professional photographers
A Workshop Base for Multi-Day Photography Retreats
Big skies, twelve hundred trees we planted, the IJssel river ten minutes away. A base camp that handles the bedding, the meals, and the dark room you will need at the end of each day.
In short
A subject for the morning, a base for the afternoon, a long table for the evening edit.
Built for cohorts of six to twelve, three to seven days, residential.
Subjects in walking distance — and a horizon when you need one
On the farm itself: twelve hundred planted trees, a swimming pond, a thatched teahouse, the Hay House barn at golden hour. Within a five-minute drive: the IJssel river, a 17th-century castle (Kasteel Nijenhuis) with a sculpture garden, working dairy farms, and the long Salland horizon.
Within thirty minutes: the Sallandse Heuvelrug national park for landscape work, three Hanseatic towns for street photography, and the heath if your workshop needs heather in bloom.
A barn that becomes a daily review room
The Hay House practice barn turns into your evening review space. Sound system, dimmable light, big wall projection if you bring a projector, and seating for the cohort. Most photography workshops use it for the daily critique session and the technique demonstrations the morning shoots build on.
The kitchen on the second floor of Horizon doubles as the editing room — long table, plenty of outlets, fibre internet for cloud workflows.
Sunrises that justify the early call time
For workshops that build around blue-hour and golden-hour shoots, we open the kitchen at the time you tell us. Pre-shoot coffee at 4:45 AM is a normal request. Post-shoot brunch at 11 AM is the natural counterpart.
In December the sun rises late enough that everyone gets a proper night’s sleep. In June, the early light is worth the alarm — and the sauna at 22:00 is worth the long day.
Why The Makers Barn
6–12
Cohort size — small enough for one-to-one feedback per day
5 min
To the IJssel river and Kasteel Nijenhuis sculpture park
30 min
To the Sallandse Heuvelrug national park for landscape work
Questions worth asking
Is the wifi fast enough for cloud-based editing workflows?
Yes. Fibre internet covers the whole farm. We have hosted workshops where every participant uploaded a day of RAW files to Lightroom Cloud overnight without trouble.
Can you arrange transport to nearby shoot locations?
For day trips to the Sallandse Heuvelrug or the Hanseatic cities, we arrange a private van for the cohort. For shorter walks to the IJssel or the castle, bicycles are free to use.
Do you have models or subjects available for portraiture workshops?
We do not provide models, but we have local network connections — agricultural workers, craftspeople, and locals who have modelled for previous workshops. Tell us your needs at booking and we will see what we can arrange.
Is there a darkroom for film-based workshops?
Not a built darkroom — but we can blackout the teahouse for tray-developed black-and-white work and have hosted analog workshops that did exactly this. Tell us at booking and we will set it up.
Planning the timeline?
Use our free 12-month launch calendar to plan phases, milestones, and the realistic timeline that actually works.
Open the launch calendarSpot the mistakes before you sign
Run the 25 most common retreat-host mistakes against your plan. 5 minutes, no signup, personalised risk report.
Take the 5-minute auditBring your photography workshop to a place with weather and time
Tell us your dates, your cohort size, and the kind of work the workshop is built around — landscape, portrait, documentary, fine art. We will come back with availability and a quote.