Khaybar Winter Camp, AlUla

A visual document of the Khaybar Winter Camp in AlUla, from golden hour deep into the night.

Photography Creative Direction Culture & Tourism

The Khaybar Winter Camp sits on a field of ancient black basalt in the AlUla region, one of the world's more uncompromising landscapes. The brief was to make monumental and intimate coexist in the same frame.

We shot across multiple nights and the transitional hours between, when the sky compresses indigo into burnt orange within minutes. No artificial light rigs: the natural gradient did the heavy work, campfire and tungsten lanterns provided the fill.

Photography

The basalt does not accommodate you — the camp was designed to exist inside it on its own terms, and the photography had to understand that before anything else.

Photography

The shoot followed the full guest journey: the approach across the lava field, arrival at the illuminated entrance, the tent village after dark, communal fire, and wide aerials that place the camp in its geological context. Signage and wayfinding were documented too, giving the client a complete library for print, editorial, and social.

Photography

From the aerial, the tent village is barely a mark on the lava plain. That proportion is the story.

"Ancient lava fields at dusk: a camp photographed as landscape art, where the light does the work that no brief can mandate."

The Khaybar Winter Camp sits on one of the world's most uncompromising landscapes: a sprawling field of ancient black basalt in the AlUla region of northwestern Saudi Arabia. The brief asked for something genuinely difficult — to make monumental and intimate coexist in a single frame, to capture both the geological weight of a lava plain that predates any human occupation and the particular warmth of a tent village lit by fire. Those two registers pull hard against each other, and resolving them was the central creative problem.

The answer was found in the light itself. We built the entire shooting plan around the transitional hours — the windows of dusk and dawn when the Khaybar sky compresses indigo into burnt orange within minutes, and when the basalt shifts from flat black to a surface of complex purple and rust. No artificial light rigs were deployed in the field-scale frames: the natural sky gradient was the primary source, with campfire and tungsten lanterns allowed only as fill where the scene demanded it. The restraint was deliberate. Manufactured light would have flattened the terrain; available light preserved its authority.

The shoot tracked the full arc of the guest experience, from the first approach across the lava field — where the scale of the landscape still dwarfs the camp entirely — through arrival at the illuminated entrance, the tent village settling into night, and the communal fire that becomes the social centre after dark. Wide aerial frames were made to place the camp in its geological context, making legible how precisely the design sits within the basalt without competing with it. Signage, wayfinding, and operational details were documented throughout, giving the client a complete and coherent asset library for marketing, editorial, and partnership use.

Every composition was planned to hold at two formats simultaneously: full-bleed print scale, where the sky and terrain command the full surface, and cropped social proportions, where the human and experiential details carry the weight. That dual-format discipline was not applied in post — it was built into the framing decisions from the first day of the shoot, which is the only way to make it work without compromise.

Client

Khaybar Winter Camp

Industry

Culture & Tourism

Services

Photography
Creative Direction

Office

Riyadh

Year

2023

Studio

HoopAI Creative Studio