I’ve led tours across Ireland, Lofoten, Lapland, and the Dolomites. Each one has its own character, its own light, its own rhythm. But when Darren Lewey first got in touch about putting together a Morocco tour, it didn’t take long to understand why this place is in a category of its own.
Most of the destinations I work in are about landscape. You’re reading weather, chasing light, waiting for the right cloud or the right wave. Morocco is all of that, but it adds something most landscape photographers rarely have to think about: people.
It’s not a landscape tour. It’s a people tour with landscapes.
The Sahara dunes, the Atlas Mountains, the Dades Valley roads at dusk, the landscape photography opportunities in Morocco are genuinely world class. But the images that stop people in their tracks are nearly always portraits. A woman selling spices in a Marrakech souk. A nomadic family in their desert camp. A fisherman in Essaouira harbour at first light. These are the photographs that stay with you.
That changes how you have to work. You can’t just set up a tripod and wait. You need people skills as much as photographic ones. You need to learn how to move through a busy medina without making people uncomfortable, how to communicate without a shared language, how to earn a moment of trust from a stranger and turn it into a portrait that means something.
That’s a genuinely different set of skills, and it’s one of the main reasons I wanted to bring Darren on board. He’s been based in Morocco since 2010, has led workshops across the country for hundreds of guests, and knows both the locations and the culture in a way that takes years to build. Having that local knowledge and those local connections is what separates a good Morocco photography trip from a great one.
The light is unlike anywhere else we shoot
Lofoten in winter gives you soft, low, golden light for most of the day. Ireland throws drama at you constantly. Morocco in October is something different again. You get extraordinary golden hour light, but you also get to deal with harsh overhead sun for hours at a time. Rather than writing off the middle of the day, we’ll use it, learning to find images in shade, contrast, and texture that most photographers would walk straight past.
And then there’s the desert at night. Astrophotography in the Sahara is genuinely something else. Low humidity, minimal light pollution, and a sky full of stars that doesn’t look quite real until you see it in your viewfinder.
It rewards photographers who are willing to slow down
One of the things Darren talks about that resonates with me is the idea that Morocco rewards patience and presence. You don’t rush through a medina. You sit with it. You let it unfold. The photographers who come home with the strongest images are the ones who stopped trying to capture everything and started looking for the right thing.
That’s a mindset shift that applies everywhere, but Morocco forces it in a way that few other places do.
We’re running our first Morocco tour this October
This is our inaugural Morocco Photography Tour and we’re genuinely excited about it. Small group, maximum of six people, with myself and Darren guiding throughout. We’ll cover everything from street and portrait photography to astrophotography and long exposures in Dades Valley, with some of the most visually extraordinary locations in North Africa along the way.
If you’ve been thinking about Morocco, October is about as good as it gets. The summer heat has eased off, the light is warm without being brutal, and the colours of the souks and landscapes are at their richest. It’s also worth mentioning that while we’re wandering through sun-drenched medinas in 25 degree heat, our Lapland tour in January sits at a comfortable -38. Just saying.
The tour runs from 14th to 22nd October 2026. There are only six places available and one is already gone, so if you’re interested don’t sit on it too long.
Find out more and book your spot here.
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