Arrive with a question
The best workshop participants arrive stuck on something specific — a plateau, a habit, a project that won't close — and say so on day one. Instructors teach to the room, and a named problem gets solved while a vague appetite gets entertained.
Spend an evening before travel writing one paragraph: what you make, what you want to make, and the gap between them. It will feel awkward. Bring it anyway; it is the single highest-value item in your luggage.
Know your camera in the dark
Workshops burn their best hours at the day's edges, and fumbling menus at dawn spends light you paid to stand in. In the fortnight before, drill the basics blind: ISO, exposure compensation, focus mode, and the card-format menu. Ten minutes on the sofa, nightly, with your eyes shut.
If your camera has been set up by guesswork since purchase, consider a masterclass first — the machine should be a colleague by the time the landscape gets involved.
Edit your expectations, not just your files
A good workshop will not transform your photography in five days. It will install one or two working disciplines that transform it over the following year, if you run them. Participants who arrive expecting the former leave disappointed; those who arrive for the latter leave with a practice.
Relatedly: you will probably not make your best-ever photograph during the workshop. You will make it three months later, because of it.
Do the physical honesty
Read the fitness notes twice and believe them. Workshop itineraries publish their walking honestly, and the participant who booked optimistically becomes the group's schedule problem by day two. If the notes say eight slow kilometres on uneven ground, walk eight kilometres on the nearest uneven ground and check the experience against your enthusiasm.
Altitude, cold, and dawn starts are also honesty items: they are all manageable, and all of them manage you if unprepared.
Close the laptop, open the notebook
Bring a paper notebook. Between sessions you will hear one-sentence corrections worth the whole fee — 'expose for the highlights', 'the foreground is the sentence' — and the phone that could record them is busy holding your boarding passes. Participants who write things down are measurably the ones who still run the disciplines a year on.
The laptop matters only on edit evenings. The notebook matters at every meal.