Before the car: the two things we confirm
Nothing is held until a date is confirmed with you in writing. A message is the start of a conversation, not a booking. We are explicit about that because the alternative is somebody arriving at a rooftop on a morning nobody agreed to.
Once the date is fixed, two details get settled in advance rather than on the day: the dress colour, and fit. The collection is adjustable and covers a wide range of sizes, which removes most of the usual anxiety, but the right dress for you is confirmed rather than assumed, and availability is per date. That conversation is worth having before you are standing on a roof.
The collection, and the drive
Door-to-door transport is included in all three photoshoots. You are collected from your hotel or your address and brought back afterwards, which is both a convenience and a practical necessity: a flying dress is bulky, the locations are not somewhere to arrive on foot in one, and early light means leaving at an hour when arranging your own car is its own small project.
The drive is where the difference between the three photoshoots is largest. Sand Dunes and the Pyramids Rooftop give you your afternoon back. Fayoum is roughly three hours from central Cairo each way, so there is about six hours of driving wrapped around a forty-five minute shoot, with the car and driver yours for all of it. That is the honest shape of the Fayoum day, and it is the reason it is priced where it is.
Arriving, and the first ten minutes
You change on site. The dress comes out of its bag, the assistant checks the back, and the photographer spends a few minutes walking the space, which is less about you than about where the sun is and what will be behind you.
The first ten minutes of actual shooting are the warm-up and nobody pretends otherwise. The throws are being calibrated, you are learning what holding a pose through a throw feels like, and the photographer is finding out how you stand. Frames from this stretch are kept, and occasionally one of them is the best thing in the set, but that is luck rather than plan.
The middle, which is where your photographs come from
Minutes ten to thirty are the session. By then the throw is landing consistently, you have stopped thinking about the fabric, and the photographer is working through positions rather than finding them. If you want a specific frame (a particular angle on the pyramids, a shot low against the sky, the two of you together), this is when to ask for it, out loud, while there is time to try it twice.
It is also when the physical cost starts to show, which is why it ends where it does. Throwing five metres of fabric is work; so is holding an extended pose with your arms up on uneven ground. Past about thirty-five minutes the throws lose height and the poses stiffen, and the frames stop being better than the ones already taken.
The last frames, and going home
The final stretch is usually the deliberate ones: the close portrait, the detail of the fabric, anything specific you asked for and did not get the first time. Then the dress goes back in the bag. It is rented for the session, not sold, and it goes back to the collection. Then the car takes you back.
Total time out of your day for Giza or the dunes is a morning. For Fayoum it is a day.
The six to ten days afterwards
More than a hundred colour-graded photographs are delivered within six to ten days. That is the inclusion as written, and the number is the point: a session like this produces hundreds of frames, and the choice made in this project was to grade and deliver the great majority of the usable ones rather than hand over a curated handful.
Grading is where the dust comes off the hem and the sky stops being three different colours across one frame. It is also why the delivery is measured in days rather than hours. If you need a particular frame sooner than that, for an announcement, a print or a flight home, say so on the day rather than afterwards.