Title • riding the dunes

When I first visited the desert I had a variety of expectations regarding what I would find: tranquility, untouched dunes running from horizon to horizon, the odd camel or two meandering around, crystal clear blue skies, and so on. It's not like that though, especially on the weekend, when the whole of Dubai and Abu Dhabi take to their quad-bikes, dune-buggies and 850bhp monster racing machines to bash their way around the largest dunes they can find.

We did try to avoid them – the big dune you can see in the shot below, which was about 500m away from where we based ourselves, was deserted when we arrived – but within half an hour or so several convoys of vehicles arrived and started racing up and down it.

Once they got bored with that they started circling around the dunes we were photographing, which was part irritating, part photo opportunity. I didn't get too many shots of them I was happy with, but did like this one: a shot of Robert (one of the students for my Lanscape Photography workshop at the recent Gulf Photo Plus FotoWeekend event) risking life and limb to get the shot :)

captured camera lens focal length aperture shutter speed shooting mode exposure bias metering mode ISO flash image quality RAW converter image editor plugins (etc) cropped?

3.00pm on 18/11/11 Canon 5D Mark II EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM 24mm f/7.1 1/2500 aperture priority +1/3 evaluative 100 no RAW Camera Raw Photoshop CS5 none 16x9