Dancing around the camel
If you’ve been looking at my Instagram feed, you would have noticed an increase in camel photographs in the last couple of days. That’s because I spent a couple of days photographing at the Dahfra Camel Festival in the Western Region of the UAE. This is a yearly festival where camels are brought in from all around the Gulf and are judged in beauty competitions in different categories.
It’s one of my favourite places to photograph as you get a very different kind of access to the local population with many of them eager to be photographed and very excited about sharing these traditions. There are many particularities about this event, including a street in the middle of the desert called “Million Street” (where camel owners parade their most prized camels) and a place where every morning the camels owners gather every morning to enter their camels into the day’s contests. I will blog more about this in the coming days, but if you’re eager to see some more images head over to Instagram.
As for the image above, these guys were stopped right in the middle of the Million Street, blasting very loud music through the speaker and doing traditional dances right in front of the camel.
