Fish-eye frame

I don’t take that many fish-eye photos. Probably it’s because I don’t carry the fish-eye lens with me that often. Actually I usually carry only three lenses with me. A 24-70, a 17 TSE and a 12mm. I like wide views so this are my go to lenses. All other I carry only when I have a specific photo in mind.

I Dubai I had the fish-eye, but only because a friend wanted to try it out. But I still took few photos, like this one in the middle of the Jumeirah lake towers. I tried to create a frame around the center of the photo by using part of the balcony and the nearby skyscraper around the edges of the shot.

This is a blend of three photos, done in Photoshop.

Dubai Lights

The lights on the Burj Khalifa are just stunning. But that so typical over the top you see all over Dubai. It really is a stunning city :). I did quite a lot of photos from this spot, as I just setup my camera to do interval shooting and let it run during the whole light show. Will share even more later on.

This is a single exposure ecited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Almas Tower

Today’s photo is a really tall one :) But the Almas tower is also really tall, so it fits. The Almas tower is right in the middle of Jumeirah lake towers area, near the Dubai Marina in Dubai. It’s really hard to miss due to the star shaped bottom. There is no other tower that looks like this.

I was standing on a balcony of a nearby skyscraper when taking this and I really wanted a photo of the whole tower. And I also wanted to get minimal distortion here. My widest lens, the 12mm Laowa was just not wide enough to get the whole tower into the shot, and I did not want to use a fisheye. So I went with a vertorama. I used the 17mm tilt shit and took three shots.

But even so, I could not get the whole tower into the picture. I was still missing the top. So here I did something I do in cases like this one. I first took the three shots I was able to get while shifting the lens up and down. Then, I shifted the lens as high as I could, and I tilted the camera up, until I got the whole top in the shot. Like this, the top photo will be distorted, but as the whole bottom part of the vertorama would be straight, I could correct that in post processing.

I used here 4 shots, each one from three exposures. Normally, I would combine this in PTgui, but that refused to put them together properly. So instead I used the new function in Lightroom, the HDR panorama one. It combined the shots really well, as you can see. I still had to correct few moving cars and people, but not much. In the end, I got a 80mpix image (the PSB was 5.8GB :)) that I’m really happy with :)

And here are few details:

Flying over the Dubai Marina

While I was in Dubai earlier this year, one of the things I did was to take a tandem flight over the Dubai Marina. It’s only around half an hour, but the the experience is wonderful. The new view you get is just spectacular.

So I took this photo while sitting in a second paramotor and being very high up. For me this was the first time I had an experience like this. For a moment I though it will be scary, to just go up in a thing like this. But luckily, I don’t fear heights and I could enjoy the flight fully. If you can and are not scared I would suggest trying it. When I go back to Dubai again, I will go again for sure :)

I have a lot of photo from this flight, and I don’t like them that much. I used the 16-35 lens, and I’m not sure what happened, but most photo are out of focus. will have to redo it.

This is a single photo, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop

Looking up in Dubai Marina

If I remember correctly, this part of the Dubai Marina, is the tallest block in the world. I wanted a photo like this when I visited Dubai few years ago, but then I forgot. So I took one this time. And I used the Laowa 12mm lens, to get as much in the shot as I could. I did had to crop it a bit in the end, as the lamps around me just made for a lot of flares. It’s funny how this gives you a feel of vertigo, even though you are looking up :)

This is a single exposure, edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.