When it comes to skylines, few cities in the world can offer as many opportunities as Dubai to do this kind of photography. Modern, vanguardist, and thriving are just some of the words I think of when I recall my trip to the city of dreams.
I spent a week there in January 2017 just photographing the ever-changing cityscape from various locations, and I had a fantastic time. There is only one thing that I’ve missed: fog. If you’ve seen it in other photos, you know what I mean. I had high hopes of photographing the buildings amidst rolling clouds of mist, but it didn’t happen. The good thing is that now, I have a good excuse to go back and try one more time … right?
Dubai is relatively easy to plan. All I did was a quick search for locations online and got many options, more than what I could shoot in a week counting two spots per day. Because some of these locations were from the rooftops of hotels or close to a specific resort and I wanted to have access granted, I booked my stay in three different places. My shooting location for the day could be as close as one elevator ride! Plus, I think it is more natural to convince someone to open up a door at dawn for you when you’re staying there.
This was the case with the photo below; it was shot from the rooftop bar of the Sheraton Four Points Sheikh Zayed. This bar, Level 43 Sky Lounge, is usually packed in the evenings, but I managed to talk to the concierge of the hotel and have it all to myself at dawn.
For this photo, I went wide, and I also used a 6-Stop ND to make the exposure long. I composed the picture in a way that the far buildings of each side of the avenue are located as close as possible one third into the image, sort of framing the diagonal and yellowish contrasting line created by Sheik Zayed Avenue itself.
The post-processing of this image was done entirely in Lightroom Classic. This photo was taken with the Fujifilm X-T2 with the lens Fujinon XF 10-24mm F4 R OIS mounted on a tripod.
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