An advertising photography shoot led to us travelling to Saudi Arabia at the end of November, a request we were more than happy to fulfil as it meant an escape to the sunshine and a respite from the greyness of the UK. So off we flew to Riyadh accompanied by 18 bags of kit (thank you to British Customs and British Airways for the smooth travel) in order to capture exactly what we were after – the shoot required a lot of light and some very high speed flash durations so we set out with 6 Profoto proheads and Pro-B3 battery packs for the perfect balance of power to flash duration. (Another blog post will follow soon covering this balance and some tests we did to find exactly what we needed) . The Procentre were once again very helpful and provided exactly what we needed – with everything properly stored in flight cases and some extra redundancies thrown in just in case.
Our hosts were excellent and managed to show us a great deal of the country and the culture during our short visit, with trips to some of the main sights in between photo shoots. We also saw some more unique sights such as this amazing private car collection which included the first Ford Model T off the production line alongside a Mercedes Benz 300SL.
But back to the photography – our aim was to capture a series of images of Arabian show horses as well as a smaller set of images of falcons in the time we had available. Our first shoot involved capturing images of a number of show horses that belong to a member of the Saudi Arabian royal family, looking to capture the ‘dancing motion’ that he was very fond of. We set up in the afternoon and shot into the darkness with a thunderstorm on its way and plenty of lightning to warn us of what was coming. We fortunately captured all we needed and got everything packed away just as the rain started to fall.
This was a really intense shoot that yielded some amazing results, there was more to follow in the coming days and this was a great starting point to build upon to capture something truly remarkable. The next shoot involved some world champion show horses…
The following day provided some more unexpected rain which had everyone we met smiling all day, they had all been waiting for it for a long time. Not to be put off we continued to our next location, scouted a sheltered area where we had enough space to shoot and began the set up for another session. The horses were stunning and incredibly well handled by the team on site as we captured everything that we needed, shooting again into the night with the aid of one of our car’s headlights.
http://instagram.com/p/wC3kW1g-XK/?modal=true
The dust, dirt, sweat and steam coming off the horses led to some very atmospheric images, capturing the power and energy of the animals, exactly what we were after.
Above is a 100% crop of one of the final images and also a perfect example of the detail we wanted to capture – movement and energy within the images along with suspended debris and tack sharp focus. (amazing to focus in the dark and still be ok – 28mm on Phase one is so hard to focus manually in low light)
All images subject to copyright © Richard Booth – no unauthorized use.