Photographer & videographer in Liwa Oasis

The desert an hour from Dubai is beautiful and crossed with tyre tracks; every camp runs dune drives through it every afternoon. Liwa is a crescent of villages and date farms on the northern rim of the Rub’ al Khali, and south of it the dunes are some of the largest on earth — ridges of peach-coloured sand a hundred metres and more high, with clean crests and nobody on them. That is the photograph: a single figure, or a flying dress, on a knife-edge ridge with nothing behind but more sand.

The cost is distance. It is about three hours from Abu Dhabi and four or more from Dubai, and the light that matters is the first hour after sunrise and the last before sunset, so the session is built around a night in Liwa — at a desert resort such as Qasr Al Sarab, or a hotel in Mezaira’a. The dunes are reached by 4×4 with a driver who knows them; sand this soft and steep is not driven on a rental-car insurance policy. It is also the most realistic place in the country for aerial work: open desert, away from airports, in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, where a licensed operator can apply to fly.