After the success of the first Red Sea Photo Camp at Marsa Shagra Village in Egypt we are doing it again! We're working on the same basic principle that worked very well in 2019, which is to run a set of talks over four days, three times over a twelve day period.
The idea is that guests can arrive and leave at anytime during or before the twelve days and as long as they are there at least four days of the camp they can access all the talks.
Our plan is to offer eight different talks, two per day. There won't be a need to attend any of the talks in a specific order. We'll do one talk every afternoon at 3.30pm and a talk in the morning which will be flexibly timed to fit in with excursion dives.
Guests will also be able to access the two of us and our colleague Paul ‘Duxy’ Duxfield for advice throughout their stay and we'll run impromptu sessions and give at least an hour's one to one time ( last camp we managed more than that) with everyone who is booked on the workshop.
The talks will cover videography, photo editing and workflow, understanding marinelife, composition, using light and underwater photography styles and techniques. Each will be one to one and a quarter hours long.
The resort has a range of accommodation from tents to air conditioned chalets. A standard package will include full board, most soft drinks and five days unlimited house reef diving. Meals are buffet style, with a good range and the meal times are long enough to allow for early morning dives and night dives without any risk of you missing out.
The house reef diving is excellent, you can dive unguided from 6am to 8pm. As well as accessing the house reef from shore, zodiac dives on the outer house reef are covered in the unlimited package. Marine life is impressively varied with regular sightings of turtles, reef sharks and dolphins as well as plenty of macro life to find and occasional sightings of whale sharks. The potential is there to get a lot of dives in during the trip. We had guests managing four dives a day and made it to talks as well.
Excursion dives are extra on a tariff scale starting at about €17 for the nearby shore dives. Elphinstone can be dived by speedboat with a journey time of about 20 minutes.
The workshops will start on 8th June and run until 19th June inclusive.
The way bookings are handled is that you book your holiday package through Oonasdivers if you are in the UK (contact Red Sea Diving Safari for their agents elsewhere) and then once you're booked you pay the workshop fee of £125 to us.
The format and the resort setup suits people coming on their own, as a couple or a group. If you have non-photographers with you they don't pay the workshop fee. There is always someone to dive with if you come on your own.
There are a good range of flights. You can either fly to Marsa Alam which is about 30-40 minutes drive from the resort or go into Hurghada which is about 3-3.5 hours away.
The advantage of the rolling programme is it doesn't matter when your flights are you can still do all the talks.
The UK agents for Red Sea Diving Safari is Ooonasdivers, their website is oonasdivers.com. if you are from elsewhere contact Red Sea Diving Safari their website is https://www.redsea-divingsafari.com and they can give you details of agents or take direct bookings.
For more details about what the camp entails, to book your workshop spaces or anything else email us at info@alphamarinephoto.com