§ Workshop — Masterclass
THE NABATEAN EMPIRE
Petra, Jordan — AlUla, Saudi Arabia
Departs · 11 October 2027 · 8 days
Participants · 6 · Spots remaining 6
From Petra to AlUla, this photographic passage follows the Nabatean world through carved stone, desert light, water, inscription and the long memory of ancient roads.
The Nabatean world is not contained within one monument or one modern border. It extends through routes, water systems, inscriptions and façades carved into two desert territories—from the rose stone of Petra to the monumental landscape of Hegra and AlUla. This eight-day photographic expedition follows that continuity. It is conceived as a passage through civilisation rather than a race between landmarks: an inquiry into how trade, geology, belief and the intelligence of water allowed cities to exist within apparent emptiness.
In Petra, photography begins with approach. The Siq controls anticipation, darkness and scale before the first façade is revealed. We will study how reflected light moves across sandstone, how architecture is understood through shadow, and how the human figure can indicate dimension without becoming the subject of the monument.
The journey then turns south and east, linking the northern and southern reaches of Nabatean culture. At Hegra and across AlUla, the visual field opens. Tomb façades stand against large rock formations and a more exposed sky. Inscription, erosion and monumental distance become the elements from which each participant builds a coherent photographic argument. When permissions and conditions allow, the programme will include night work beneath the desert sky. Astrophotography is approached as part of the historical imagination of the route, but never promised against access rules, cloud, moonlight or operational safety.
This is not a catalogue of famous views. It is a slow reading of a civilisation written into stone: a workshop for photographers willing to wait until architecture, desert and human time enter the same frame.
§ Field Work
Field Work
The Siq decides first
Petra's light does not arrive at once. The open hills can already be bright while the Siq still holds reflected colour and deep shade — the Siq itself controls anticipation before the first façade is seen. Read that difference before framing anything: a carved wall's exposure depends on the direction it faces, not on its fame.
Two deserts, two kinds of light
AlUla is Petra's opposite reply: no enclosing canyon, monuments standing against open rock and a wide sky. Carry the discipline learned in the Siq — reflected light, patience with shadow — into a place where nothing encloses it any more. The two sites teach two different lessons in the same week; neither substitutes for the other.
The travel diary
Our age hands us machines and calls them memory. They are fast, and the journey is not. The journey asks for the opposite of speed: it asks for pauses, for halts, for the hours when the body rests and the mind catches up with where it has been.
Carry a notebook, and write in it by hand. There are moments on every journey when you find yourself alone, for an instant, before the immensity in front of you. It is then that thoughts arrive which will never come again, and which no screen will keep for you. Fix them on the page, or they scatter into the dust, the sun and the wind of the day, and are lost.
A gift of your own images
Most of the advice I can give you is obvious. Protect your equipment. Keep your socks and shirts away from the dust, because pulling on a clean, fresh shirt is always a pleasure. Any traveller knows these things, and perhaps you know them already. I say them not to teach, but because a teacher leads by example.
But there is one thing I have learned over the years that I do not impose on you: I recommend it, with force. If you wish to build a real relationship with the people you meet, a gesture of tenderness, a gift, is the surest way. Travellers have always carried gifts to the peoples and the strangers who received them. And what is the most precious gift a photographer can give? An image.
My suggestion is simple. Take one of those small photo albums, ten by fifteen, and fill it with the pictures you love most, printed small. Give them to the people you meet along the way. Write on them with a suitable pen: hello, your name, thank you, whatever you wish. The print becomes a personal object, made for that person alone. It costs you nothing, and it is an extraordinarily powerful gesture.
And it will raise you onto another scale as a human being. You will no longer be someone who arrives, takes an image and leaves. You will be someone who gives something back, who leaves a trace of gratitude instead of only carrying one away. The people before your lens feel that difference at once, and they meet you as a person, not as a camera. That is where the finest photographs are born, and something more than photographs: a bond.
§ The Light Map
The Light Map
In Petra, daylight does not arrive everywhere at once. The open hills can be bright while the Siq still holds reflected colour and deep shade. A carved façade receives the sun according to its orientation, not according to its fame. We begin by reading that difference, allowing the place to interrupt the photograph we expected to make.
From 11 to 16 October, sunrise at Petra moves from approximately 06:38 to 06:41, with sunset from 18:12 to 18:07. In AlUla, sunrise falls around 06:25–06:28 and sunset around 18:05–18:00. Both use the same local clock, but latitude, longitude and the enclosing rock give them distinct photographic days.
Full moon falls on 15 October. The workshop moves from waxing gibbous into the first day after full moon, bringing substantial lunar illumination to its later nights. Open ground can retain shape and depth after dark, while moonlight reduces the visibility of fainter stars. The presence of the moon does not make a canyon uniformly lit: rock still decides what remains hidden.
October is generally warm and comparatively dry. Around Petra, average night temperatures are roughly 12°C, with daytime highs in the mid-twenties. AlUla is hotter, with daytime temperatures commonly in the low thirties during this part of the month and a marked cooling after sunset. Dust, occasional rain and local exposure still affect visibility and the day's rhythm.
Petra asks for attention to enclosure and reflected light; Hegra and AlUla open the photograph towards isolated monuments and a wider sky. Between them, our task is not to produce a continuous series of golden façades. It is to recognise how carving, erosion and human passage have given light different places to rest.
§ What You Will Learn
What You Will Learn
In Petra, a façade is preceded by a passage. The body travels through shadow before the eye meets the open space. That approach belongs to the architecture as much as the monument itself. Across Petra, Hegra and AlUla, we will learn to photograph how a place is encountered, as well as what it contains.
Approach, scale, revelation
We will study the sequence of viewpoints through which architecture becomes visible. You will work with the difference between an image made from within a confined passage and one made across an open plain, considering how distance and focal length change the viewer's sense of arrival.
A person in the frame may clarify the dimensions of a façade, but placement and timing determine whether that presence helps the image. We will attend equally to the unoccupied spaces: the ground before a tomb, the interval between structures, the darkness beneath a carved opening.
Sandstone and reflected light
Light reaching stone directly behaves differently from light returned by another wall. You will learn to recognise these changes in colour and contrast, meter important surfaces and preserve the transitions through which carving acquires depth.
We will work with tripod stability, focus placement and depth of field, comparing a precise architectural description with a more selective study of surface. Where the brightness range requires it, exposure bracketing will be used deliberately. Lens filtration and white balance will be judged for what they retain or remove from the colour of the stone.
Reading what the frame cannot explain alone
An inscription, a water channel and a monumental façade communicate at different scales. You will learn to photograph the detail with enough context to relate it to the larger site, and to gather the information needed for accurate captions.
We will distinguish what can be observed in the image from what requires historical explanation. That distinction will help you build a visual argument without asking an attractive surface to stand for an entire civilisation.
A route through the images
The edit will connect the enclosed approaches of Petra with the more open architectural landscapes farther along the journey. Wide views, intermediate distances and details will create changes of pace.
Where the programme allows night photography, we will study manual focus, exposure and the balance between sky and foreground as an extension of this architectural reading. Throughout, the purpose is to build a coherent account of stone shaped by human intention, then altered by time.
§ The Itinerary
The Itinerary
§ Phase 01
Arrival · Petra
The road enters the stone
Welcome to Petra. Taking inspiration from the ancient Greek tradition of teaching while walking, we will set out slowly towards the hidden city. This first approach will be more than an introduction: it will be an almost initiatory passage, allowing the landscape, the history and the scale of Petra to reveal themselves gradually. As we walk, Luca and his team will introduce the group to Nabataean history and culture, while beginning to explore some of the fundamental questions of landscape photography: how to observe before photographing, how to read light and scale, and how to enter a place without immediately trying to possess it through an image. We will also address a more delicate but essential subject: the etiquette of the responsible photographer. Petra is not merely an archaeological site administered for visitors. It is also the ancestral home of a living community whose relationship with this landscape long predates its transformation into one of the world's most visited destinations. Its residents have had to adapt to displacement, tourism and the commercial use of a world that was once their home. Luca will tell this story and explain how we must conduct ourselves in order to establish, from the very beginning, a respectful and positive relationship with the local community. The people who belong to this landscape should not be confused with the institutions and commercial structures that manage the archaeological site. Every participant will be expected to observe this shared photographic etiquette. In a place where trust is built slowly, the careless behaviour of a single person can affect the relationship between the entire group and the people who receive us. Before taking our first photographs, we will therefore begin with something more fundamental: learning how to enter Petra.
§ Phase 02
Petra
The Siq and the first revelation
We will enter Petra early, when the movement of visitors has not yet overwhelmed the silence of the place and the first reflected light begins to travel across the sandstone. The Siq is not simply an entrance. It is a carefully measured passage between darkness and revelation: a narrow fracture in the rock that controls pace, anticipation and scale. We will learn to photograph it not merely as a route towards the Treasury, but as an extraordinary visual work in its own right—observing how light descends along its walls, how colour changes from one turn to the next, and how the human figure can reveal the monumental dimensions of the landscape. When Al-Khazneh finally appears, we will resist the instinct to reproduce the familiar image. The Treasury has been photographed millions of times; our task will be to wait until architecture, light and human presence create a relationship that belongs to this particular moment. Throughout the day, Luca and his team will work closely with the group on composition, reflected light, exposure in extreme contrast and the use of scale. Above all, we will begin learning how to remain present after the first astonishment has passed—because the most interesting photograph often appears only when the obvious one has already been made.
Beyond the Treasury
Petra does not end at the Treasury. Today we will move beyond its most celebrated façade and enter the wider archaeological landscape: a vast system of tombs, pathways, sacred spaces and architecture excavated from the mountain itself. The photographic challenge changes with the terrain. We will work with distance and depth, searching for the relationship between individual monuments and the immense geology that surrounds them. Erosion, shadow, carved surfaces and the slow movement of people through the landscape will become elements of a more complex visual language. The route will be chosen according to access, weather and the physical condition of the participants. For those prepared for the climb, the journey towards Ad Deir—the Monastery—offers one of Petra's most extraordinary encounters between architecture and open space. A meaningful alternative will always be maintained for anyone who should not undertake the ascent. This second day is also an invitation to move beyond isolated images. Luca will help each participant begin to recognise connections between photographs: repetitions, contrasts, gestures and changes of scale capable of transforming separate frames into the beginning of a personal narrative. Petra will no longer be simply the subject in front of us. It will begin to become a story.
§ Phase 03
The Nabataean road
Little Petra and the passage south
On our final photographic day in Jordan, we will turn towards Siq al-Barid—Little Petra. More intimate and less theatrical than its celebrated neighbour, it offers a different understanding of the Nabataean world. Here, architecture emerges through proximity. Narrow passages, carved rooms, stairways and traces of ancient gathering places allow us to study the relationship between everyday life and the routes that once carried people, goods and ideas across the desert. The scale is more human, the rhythm quieter, and the act of looking becomes more attentive. We will photograph the dialogue between inhabited space and stone, working with details, thresholds, surfaces and the fragments that reveal how a civilisation lived—not only how it wished to be remembered. The day will also allow us to refine the visual themes developed during our time in Petra, with individual guidance from Luca and moments of collective discussion in the field. Little Petra is both a conclusion and a threshold. It closes our work in Jordan while preparing us intellectually and visually for the journey towards Hegra and AlUla, where the same Nabataean imagination will reappear in another country, under a different sky.
§ Phase 04
Transfer day
Crossing the Nabataean world
Today we leave Petra behind and begin the long journey towards AlUla, following the ancient Nabataean world across a modern international border. The route covers approximately 580 kilometres and requires a full day, with around nine hours of driving, stops along the way and the necessary formalities at the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia. This is not a photographic working day, but an essential passage between the two great territories of the expedition: from the northern capital of the Nabataeans to their extraordinary southern landscape. We will arrive in AlUla in the evening, settle into our accommodation and rest before beginning the next chapter of the journey.
§ Phase 05
Hegra
The southern capital
Our first full day in AlUla is devoted to Hegra, the great southern city of the Nabataeans and the first site in Saudi Arabia to be inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. After the enclosed passages and rose-coloured stone of Petra, the visual language changes completely. Here, monumental tombs rise from isolated sandstone formations beneath an immense and exposed sky. Distance becomes part of the architecture: every façade must be understood not only through its carved surface, but through its relationship with the desert surrounding it. We will study how the Nabataeans used proportion, orientation and landscape to create a dialogue between human ambition and geological time. Inscriptions, eroded details and unfinished tombs will allow us to read the site as a living historical document rather than as a collection of monuments. Photographically, we will work with scale, separation and silence. Luca will guide each participant in deciding when the landscape should dominate the frame, when architecture should become the central presence, and when a human figure can reveal dimensions that would otherwise remain impossible to perceive. Access, equipment and movement within Hegra are carefully regulated. Our work will therefore follow the conditions established for the site, transforming those limits into part of the photographic discipline: fewer gestures, greater concentration and a more precise awareness of every image. By the end of the day, Hegra should no longer appear as the distant counterpart of Petra. It will have begun to reveal its own character—the southern expression of the same civilisation, conceived beneath a wider sky.
§ Phase 06
AlUla
Stone, writing and the open sky
Our final photographic day expands beyond Hegra into the wider cultural landscape of AlUla: an extraordinary territory in which geology, agriculture, writing and human settlement have accumulated across thousands of years. According to confirmed access and local conditions, we will work among selected sites such as the ancient landscapes of Dadan, the inscriptions of Jabal Ikmah, the earthen architecture of AlUla Old Town and the monumental rock formations that surround the oasis. The objective is not to collect landmarks, but to understand how different periods of human history continue to inhabit the same desert. The photographic rhythm will be slower and more independent. Each participant will be encouraged to return to the themes developed throughout the workshop—thresholds, scale, erosion, reflected light, human presence and the intelligence of water—and to use them in constructing a personal visual argument. Luca will work individually with every photographer, helping to identify the images that belong together and the gaps that still remain. This last field session is therefore both an act of photography and an act of editing: we will not simply search for new pictures, but for the photographs needed to complete the story. As the light withdraws from the rocks and the desert begins to lose its visible boundaries, Petra and AlUla will finally come together—not as two disconnected destinations, but as two chapters of a single civilisation written into stone.
§ Phase 07
Return journey
The road back to Petra
After our final morning in AlUla, we begin the journey back towards Petra. Once again, this is a full transfer day: we will cross the border from Saudi Arabia into Jordan and retrace the long desert road that connects the two ends of the Nabataean world. The return to Petra is an essential part of the expedition, allowing the group to complete the international route and reach the original meeting point. We expect to arrive in the evening, carrying with us two landscapes, two countries and a single photographic story written across the desert.
§ Accommodation
Accommodation
Petra · honouring the land
In Petra, we have chosen not to retreat into the anonymity of a conventional international hotel. We will stay at the Ammarin Bedouin Camp, near Little Petra: a place created by the local community and managed by the Ammarin tribe to preserve its culture while generating sustainable work and income for the people who belong to this land.
This is not a theatrical reconstruction of Bedouin life. It is an act of hospitality rooted in a living tradition. Members of the community prepare the food, welcome the guests and share their knowledge of the landscape. We will sleep in traditional goat-hair tents, with real beds, clean linen, electricity and hot showers, surrounded by rock, sand and the immense silence of the desert.
The choice reflects the ethics of the workshop. At Petra, accommodation is not simply a question of comfort; it is part of our relationship with the place. Staying here allows us to honour the people who have protected these landscapes, to approach their culture with respect and to ensure that our presence contributes directly to the community receiving us.
As the camp itself says:
“At the Ammarin Bedouin Camp, you can sleep beneath a billion stars, not merely three, four or five, as you would in a hotel.”
AlUla · the monumental desert
In AlUla, we have made a radically different choice. For the final chapter of the workshop, we will stay at Banyan Tree AlUla, one of the most extraordinary desert hotels in the world. Its villas are set within the monumental landscape of the Ashar Valley, surrounded by vast sandstone formations whose scale, colour and silence seem almost impossible.
Here, architecture does not attempt to dominate the desert. It withdraws into it. The villas, terraces and tented structures become discreet points of observation within a landscape so immense that it can leave you momentarily speechless.
After travelling through Petra, crossing the border and photographing the southern Nabataean world at Hegra, Banyan Tree offers more than rest. It allows the experience to continue after the cameras have been put away. The desert remains outside the windows, the rock formations hold the final light, and the night returns the valley to silence.
The exceptional character of Banyan Tree AlUla lies precisely here: it is not merely an elegant hotel placed beside a remarkable destination. It is an accommodation conceived as an immersion in one of the most powerful landscapes on Earth.
Petra and AlUla therefore offer two different forms of hospitality: one rooted in community, memory and living Bedouin culture; the other suspended within the monumental beauty of the desert. Both are part of the journey.
§ The Equipment
The Equipment
§ Photo Gear
Photo Gear
Petra arrives already spent, its likeness rehearsed a thousandfold before flesh ever meets stone. This workshop's labour is not the image the world already possesses, but its unmaking — a descent toward essence, the hush beneath the icon.
That essence exacts a scale beyond the common negative — the Treasury wrought from living rock, Hegra solitary beneath an immensity of sky. Only large format answers so vast a claim to permanence.
Yet Petra spurns stillness. Rugged ground, long marches between thresholds, summon the view camera's antithesis — a light, compact medium format, fidelity borne upon the shoulder where the tripod cannot follow.
Then the instrument itself must dissolve. Amid bedouin and passing multitudes, discretion outranks ambition — better mistaken for the bumbling tourist than marked as the expedition photographer. Whoever appears armed is shown less. Whoever appears harmless is admitted.
At Hegra and AlUla, scale inverts entire. Where Petra conceals before it reveals, here concealment finds no purchase: tombs rise solitary within a desert without end, an Arabia unlike Jordan's not in the hue of its sand but in the feeling restored whole — no longer a secret behind rock, but an infinity granting no shelter. Each façade grows the more monumental precisely because the emptiness surrounding it offers no resistance.
Here instinct must reverse itself. No longer the patience of an opening awaited, but the discipline of rendering absence — space that will not close, sky ending nowhere. Large format bears this scale still, now joined by the true ultra-wide, holding the near tomb and the dissolving distance within a single frame.
Here the rarest instruments come into their own — panoramic cameras, the largest formats of all, finding at last a horizon their equal: wide enough to demand a negative capable of holding it whole.
Camera and lenses
Stability and light
Access rules differ between Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and can change with little notice — tripods, night work and drones may all need separate permission at any given site. Pack as though everything will be allowed, and be ready to work handheld on the day it is not.
Desert protection
Field and edit
What we bring
Behind every participant travels a second kit: Luca's own. There are the LEE filters and matte boxes, a full set covering graduated density, solid density and polarisers, for those without their own or simply curious to compare one glass against another under this particular light. There are the SEKONIC light and colour meters, for reading a dawn that changes its mind by the minute inside the Siq's narrow throat. And there is a large-format camera or two, carried more from love than necessity, offered to anyone whose project might ask for something slower than a shutter can give.
§ Personal Gear
Personal Gear
Petra is climbed, AlUla is crossed. Two deserts, two countries, many steps.
Petra is a city you enter on foot, and AlUla a desert you cross in silence. Between the two there are steps, sand, heat at noon and cold after sunset, and two countries with their own sense of dignity in how one dresses. Come prepared for all of it, and the stone will have your whole attention.
What you bring
What we buy together
What we bring for you
Everything else travels with us in a waterproof dry bag: local SIM cards, and a loan phone if needed; a Starlink satellite connection wherever it is permitted; a walkie-talkie; a first-aid kit; a satellite locator beacon and an emergency flare for the desert days; a compass, a map case and printed maps; a tablet for every two people; a little local currency; a laminated emergency sheet; a compact phrasebook; document pouches; and your own printed copy of our unique guide.
§ The Traveller's Wisdom
The Traveller's Wisdom
Exploring together
There is a particular rhythm to travelling with photographers. We walk together, then something catches someone’s attention and the pace changes. One person has already found their photograph; another is still watching the light. A little farther along, a passage or a line in the landscape invites someone else to stop.
In Petra and AlUla, I like to leave room for these different ways of seeing. Exploration belongs to the work, and there will be moments when you wish to spend a little time away from the place where the group has gathered. You can do so, always in pairs. Choose someone whose company you enjoy and with whom you feel comfortable exploring. Each pair will carry a walkie-talkie.
We cannot depend on mobile reception throughout these landscapes. Our radios allow us to keep in touch without relying on the telephone network, though the shape of the land affects their reach too. Before you move away, let me know where you are heading, and we will agree on where to meet again. These small arrangements give us the freedom to follow our own photographs while keeping an attentive eye on one another.
Planning, discussion & staying informed
Each evening, we will sit down together and look ahead to the following day. We will talk about the places we intend to reach, the photographs we might find there, the way we will travel and the walking involved. At breakfast, we will return briefly to that conversation, going over the essentials and any adjustments before we leave.
I want everyone to understand the day we are setting out into. These conversations are also the moment to say what you think. Perhaps a particular route feels too demanding, an activity does not appeal to you, or something in the programme leaves you uneasy. Whatever the reason, bring it into the conversation. You do not have to justify a concern before sharing it, and the confidence of others need not determine how you feel.
This is a photographic experience for the soul, not a course in becoming a hero.
As the day unfolds, keep me informed about the smaller things too. A foot beginning to hurt, a blister, a little cut on a hand, tiredness that feels greater than you expected: these are easy things to dismiss when there is so much around us to see. Please mention them while they are still small.
A group is made up of individuals, each experiencing the same day a little differently. Knowing how you are allows me to take that into account. It is how I can look after all of us while giving each of you the attention you need.
Petra — distance, height & balance
Petra asks us to look upwards as well as ahead. Some of the positions we seek lie above the valley floor, on higher ground or along the upper reaches of the canyons. As we rise, the city begins to reveal different relationships: a façade finds its place among the surrounding cliffs, a passage opens into a wider view, and the scale of the stone becomes easier to understand.
Old passages and stairways cut into the rock bring us to many of these places. Walking them involves the effort of ascent, but also the quieter work of keeping our balance on uneven steps and finding our footing on the way down. A camera bag adds its own weight to every movement.
This is why I recommend a walking pole, even to those who are entirely comfortable on their feet. It gives you another point of support as you move from one photographic position to the next. While walking, allow your attention to return to the ground. When something makes you want to lift the camera, stop first and find a steady position from which to look.
At Petra, a distance on a map tells only part of the story. The steps, the changes in height and the equipment on your shoulders all belong to the journey.
AlUla — walking between sand & rock
In AlUla, the ground can change from soft sand to uneven rock, asking us to adjust our pace and footing along the way. On sand, each step yields a little; on stony ground, we give more attention to where we place our feet. With photographic equipment on our backs, even a modest distance can involve more effort than the view ahead suggests.
The walking pole earns its place here as well. It offers another point of support as the surface changes, helping us move with greater steadiness between the places where we stop to photograph.
When choosing what to take out for a session, remember that every lens will travel the whole way with you, including the hours when you do not use it. A bag that sits securely and leaves your hands free makes exploration easier. Carry what you expect to work with, and leave room for water and the clothing the day requires.
There is a pleasure in arriving at a photographic position with enough energy left to give it your full attention. The way we carry our equipment helps make that possible.
Clothing for the desert
People who live and work in deserts have much to teach us about dressing for them. Loose clothing that covers the skin and a head covering that shelters the head, neck and face are practical companions for long days outside. Give them the same consideration you give your shoes and camera bag, choosing garments that let you walk, climb and carry your equipment comfortably.
Through the many years I have spent travelling in deserts, I have come to appreciate the tagelmust, the traditional Tuareg head wrap, particularly when working as a photographer. We may walk for some time with our equipment, then remain almost still while a photograph takes shape. A length of cloth that can be adjusted around the head and neck, or drawn across the face when the wind lifts the sand, is useful through all these changes. I recommend bringing one for our days in Petra and AlUla.
It has another use that is especially welcome in the heat. If you begin to feel uncomfortably hot, pause in the shade and wet the fabric thoroughly with cool water. Place it loosely over your head and the back of your neck, keeping your face clear. As the water evaporates, it helps draw heat away. Rest with it there, and wet it again as it dries.
If that feeling of heat comes with a headache, dizziness, nausea or unusual weakness, stop walking and let your companion and me know straight away. The wet cloth can help with cooling, but confusion, collapse or difficulty staying alert require urgent medical help and immediate cooling of more of the body.
Think of clothing as something that accompanies the whole day: the approach, the time spent photographing and the walk back. When it allows us to move comfortably and remain at ease, more of our attention is available for the place itself.
Stay hydrated
In the dry air of Petra and AlUla, sweat can evaporate almost unnoticed. Your clothes may feel dry even as you walk, climb or stand with the camera. Meanwhile, a photograph can absorb you so completely that a long time passes before you think of drinking.
Keep your water where you can reach it easily. A bottle in an accessible pocket or a drinking reservoir with a tube means you can take a few mouthfuls without putting everything down and opening your bag. Make use of the pauses throughout a session. When you feel thirsty, allow yourself that moment, even if the photograph is unfinished or the group has not yet moved on.
Over several hours of walking and sweating, we lose salts as well as water. Water remains essential, and during prolonged exertion we can complement it with electrolytes from food or an electrolyte drink. Individual sachets, mixed according to their instructions, are easy to carry. The aim is to replace what we are losing; there is no benefit in forcing ourselves to drink excessive amounts.
Tea along the way
We will often stop for tea with our local hosts. There will be time to put down our bags, settle into a seat and allow conversation to take the place of walking.
The tea contributes to our fluid intake. In dry conditions where sweat can evaporate freely, a warm drink can also encourage sweating and help the body release heat. Its value belongs to the pause as a whole: something to drink, a little rest and a place out of the sun.
I would not want us to pass through these landscapes without making time for the people who live in them. Sitting together over tea allows an encounter to find its own pace. These moments belong to our photographic journey just as fully as those in which we have a camera to our eye.
Eating during the day
Our days will include regular, carefully planned stops for food. We will buy from local vendors whom I have known well for many years, giving ourselves time to eat and recover between stretches of walking and photography.
You may not wish to eat local food at every stop. In that case, bring a few energy bars you know you enjoy, something familiar that is easy to reach when you need it. Walking across sand, climbing stone steps and carrying equipment can make a day more demanding than its distances suggest. Sometimes your appetite catches up with that effort only later; a snack between meals helps keep you fuelled along the way.
Sun protection
Clothing and a head covering do much of the work, but there will always be places where the skin remains exposed. For our days outdoors, bring a broad-spectrum, water-resistant sunscreen with SPF 50 or higher, offering protection against both UVA and UVB.
Apply it generously, remembering the ears, the back of the neck and the backs of the hands. With a camera in our hands and our attention elsewhere, these are easy places to forget. Renew the protection at least every two hours, and after heavy sweating or wiping your skin, following the product instructions.
This belongs to our preparation in every season. Cool air can make hours outside feel comfortable, but it does not tell us how much ultraviolet exposure we are receiving. Keep your sunscreen close to your water, where it is easy to find. During one of our pauses, it takes only a moment to look after the skin that has been carrying the day with you.
§ Post-Workshop
Post-Workshop
After leaving Petra and the Nabatean desert, where carved stone, water and long roads had begun to enter one frame, the images ask for the cohort that learned to read that civilisation together.
I did not include six months of post-workshop contact by chance, nor as a simple service.
Many years ago, I was teaching an online course that could easily have felt impersonal. Instead, when it ended, the group did not want to dissolve. We had never all sat around the same table, yet years later we are still a living community. From that experience came conversations, magazines, books, friendships and shared ways of looking.
It taught me how valuable a small circle of people can be when they have lived and worked through an experience together.
For this reason, every workshop includes six months of continued contact at no additional cost, and those months are where the photographs are carried to their end, together. A private group keeps the images moving between us: feedback, and a tuition that goes on, fed by cultural prompts — a book, an image, a thought, an exhibition, an occasion that opens a new direction. Each of you brings your images to a master file ready for fine print, and then we sit down, one to one, before the finished work. Then the group meets again, and there is a particular pleasure in it: seeing how far each of us has travelled since we parted. A Second Eye, an editor or a curator, reads the work as the profession reads it. And the work takes form, a collective book or a zine, depending on the event, and a public life, on a gallery wall or in the pages of Follow the Light. The images do not go back into a drawer. They go out into the world, and they go out together.
The event ends. The adventure in photography begins.
§ 04 — The Archive
Frames from Petra, Jordan — AlUla, Saudi Arabia
A selection of high-resolution frames captured on past expeditions. Select any image to view it full-size.