Sabine Albers has photographed adventure races through the Argentine mountains, food for the Australian Open, and events across multiple continents. When she was commissioned by Etihad Airways to photograph the VIP hospitality venues at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, she approached it the same way she approaches everything: arrive early, accept that nothing will be ready, and be prepared to not be prepared.
The brief was enormous. Abu Dhabi has around nine or ten high-end hospitality venues attached to well-known restaurants including Nobu and Opa, all built as full double-storey structures with balconies, unlimited champagne, and food at a level that Sabine describes plainly as ridiculously expensive but genuinely worth it if you have the means.
She arrived two days before the race to do a recce. The chefs were not ready to be photographed. The venues were still being painted. Nobody knew anything. That is standard, she says — the only thing you can control at an event is your gear and yourself, and everything else you let go and react to.
The episode goes into what it actually takes to shoot food and hospitality at this scale under race weekend pressure, how her background photographing adventure races in extreme conditions shaped the way she works, and what separates a good event photograph from a great one. She also talks about the contrast between the extreme wealth of the Abu Dhabi paddock and the local culture surrounding it — a tension she found genuinely interesting rather than uncomfortable.
Sabine grew up in Europe with a father who had a connection to motorsport and still remembers driving through Monaco as a child trying to visualise racing cars on those streets.
www.sabinealbers.com