Camels have walked the desert outside Dubai long before the city’s towers ever existed, and to capture that ancient presence at sunset is still deeply gratifying.
Behind Dubai’s skyline of glass and steel, the camel remains one of the most enduring symbols of Dubai and the Arabian Peninsula in general. The Bedouin, traditionally desert-dwelling herders, built their entire way of life around this animal. If a camel were born, the Bedouin would celebrate it as if a child had arrived in their family.
And even though a big metropolis grew out of the desert, this friendship remained. And this photo is the perfect testimony. As the setting sun over the Arabian Desert obscures details of the handler and his camel, even from a distance, their tender relationship shines.
Is it easy to photograph the genuine Bedouin lifestyle in Dubai?
That’s a fair question, and one worth being honest about.
The Bedouin are traditionally nomadic Arab people, historically identified by their practice of herding camels and goats across deserts and arid regions. For centuries, camels provided transport, food, milk, and material for tents and clothing, all in one.
Today, many Bedouin have settled into cities and modern professions. Genuine nomadic Bedouin, in the traditional sense, are essentially gone from the Dubai area. Most Emirati families with Bedouin ancestry settled generations ago, and today they live in houses and hold regular jobs.
So, camels: yes, very easy to capture. Camps and handlers are everywhere and set up specifically for this kind of shoot. “Real” Bedouin living in the desert, on the other hand… not so easy to photograph. That lifestyle has been evolving and adapting for decades. I wrote more about the Bedouin in this post about Qatar and camels.
So how did I manage to capture this Bedouin scene in the desert?
This photo was part of our expedition with PhotoPills in Dubai, where, among other things, we teach participants how to predict exactly where the sun will set. For this, we hired a handler and his camel as our subject.
Our beautiful model, as you can see, wasn’t thrilled about being pulled away from the herd right at dinner time. When positioning, the trick was to angle the camel so it always faces back toward camp. Otherwise it keeps turning, since all it wants is to get back to dinner!
And then, when everything was set up and we knew exactly where the sun was setting, we started experimenting with various focal lengths. Some of the participants were going farther back to get the entire scene, including the open desert, the camel, the handler, and the setting sun.
As for me, I set up a bit closer to our subjects to frame them looking at each other with the sun setting just behind their heads. A composition that, to me, echoed the sacred bond that the Bedouin have with their camels.
