Wandering around the desert at night

In an effort to enjoy time here in Kuwait more and to get some of the rust off my photo skills, I have started a photo club for staff at my school. We decided the first thing we would do with our club is some night time photography. I never really did night time painting with light or steel wool kind of photography when I was studying photojournalism so I've been having fun playing around with it.

We have our Eid holiday right now so we figured this would be a good time since we don't have to get up early for school. Since I haven't been randomly driving around the desert- at night or during the day- I wasn't really sure where to go. Some of the photogs had gone with the Q8 expat photography group to shoot the Milky Way a couple weeks ago and sent us that location. I also knew there were some interesting graffitied cement walls on the drive up to the ridge so we thought we would try that area. It's basically on the opposite side of town so it took us about an hour to get there.

The place with the graffitied wall was cool, but there was a fair amount of traffic headed up that road- for being out in the middle of nowhere. It seemed like some kids were having a kegger- or some kind of party out there. One of the trucks stopped and offered us some coffee. Anne was getting nervous with all that and wanted to leave so we hopped back in the car and decided to just drive further and see what we could find.

We drove for some time without really any options of side roads to take into the desert until finally we came to one that was near an oil field. As we started down that road there were bright lights and we thought it might be a security check point for the oil field. When we got up to it, it turned out to be a convenience  store in a trailer. Clearly the people that were running it lived there behind the store. Also, there was a cage full of pigeons.

We asked if we could take pictures and they said we could. (We all bought some drinks and snacks too) We tried to ask about the pigeons- what are they for? are you going to eat them? Then a car started coming toward the store. This was in the middle of nowhere and there were not really any cars so this caught our attention. As the car pulled in Anne said, "Is that a falcon?" Sure enough, there was a falcon riding in the car. A man got out and we all basically swarmed him and asked if we could take pictures of the falcon- which he let us. Then we realized what the pigeons were for. (collective ooooohhhhh) He was buying food for his falcon.

After that stop we headed further up the road into the oil field where we found a tractor and decided to play around with that taking light painting photos. The only camera we had that was *working wasn't a SLR camera and the longest exposure we could get from it was an 8 second exposure. It was kinda hard to work with such a short time, so pretty much all of us worked together and we got some fun shots. *I think I forgot to mention that my camera refused to recognize my memory card and Joanna's camera ran out of battery. We were running on cell phones and Kevin's camera.

Since my camera and Joanna's camera were not working we decided to head out again the next night. I really wanted to get a steel wool shot because I had never done it before. We hadn't tried the night before because we didn't think we would have a long enough exposure time, but it turns out we could have. This time we decided to drive south of town and see what we could find to shoot in the desert that direction.

Basically, nothing. This only served as a lesson to us that we should NOT go south of town to shoot in the desert. We eventually found a place to just pull over and take some steel wool pics, but we didn't find anything cool and there was A LOT of traffic out that way. We pretty much just drove around Kuwait for 4+ hours and I now feel like I've almost covered this whole country. The second night was not as fun.

Anyways, overall it was fun to get out and explore a little bit and play with nighttime photography. Next time I'm going to the ridge. :)

The graffitied wall. I think there's more we can do here- need to go back. 

The totally random bakala/trailer store in the middle of nowhere. 

Decent selection for a bakala. (*a bakala is a convenience store)

Kevin shooting the pigeons.

Falcon riding shot gun.  

Getting some falcon food. 

Showing off his falcon without the hood on his head. 

This was a workout for Joanna and Wayne.
They had to make those circles with flashlights in less than 8 seconds.
They literally had to sprint through it. 

We had 4 different people lighting different parts of the tractor.
Anne said it looks like a picture for a magazine selling tractors. :) 

Camel sign-- this was from the second night. 

Steel wool photography.
Basically you pull the wool apart and put it in a wire whisk, light it on fire and then spin it around. 

We had the whisk attached to a leash and I made Kevin wear a protective hoodie.