Palm Jumeirah at night

Today’t photo includes the whole Palm Jumeirah. I wanted it whole, but I did not plan for it to be this wide, but it’s to late to retake it :). So I’m stuck with this view.

Palm Jumeirah is a huge structure, so it’s quite hard to get it all, and still get a nice detail. So for this one, I did a 5 shot panorama, each shot from 3 exposures. The result is so big, that Photoshop refused to save it as a JPG at full size :) I ended up with a 5.5GB PSB file and a final resolution of 130Mpix (25500×5000 pixels)

But this also makes it hard to display it properly here. So since the standard size is just too small, here you can see a much bigger resolution (please right click the link and choose open in new tab to see it full size) and I’m also including some detail shots here. Probably, later on I will make a zoomable panorama from it, as the ones that are available here.

And here are few details:

Island builders at night

There is so much construction in Dubai. You can see cranes everywhere you look. But they are not only building skyscrapers, they are also building more islands. And while I was taking photo from one of the skyscrapers in the Dubai marina, I noticed this ship. I’m not 100% sure what they were doing there, but it do looked like they were moving rocks from one area to other, so building new islands in the marina.

This is a blend from three exposures. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.

Framed view of the Grand Mosque

I revisited the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, while in Dubai, and got quite a lot of photos. Now, with many more lenses available than I had before, I can also get quite different views there. Especially the tilt shift came in handy. But as the Grand Mosque was quite full of people the day I was there, I also took few more zoomed in shots. And here is one of the main entrance. This is quite a popular composition here, as you can really nicely frame the main tower of the Grand Mosque, with the arch of the entrance. You just have to step away a bit and zoom in your lens :)

This is a blend of two exposures, done in Photoshop.

Sunrise at the top

I’m trying a bit to relax these few days, as I’m still quite tired from running around for a whole week. And the 30 degree temperature difference between Dubai and Bratislava is also not so easy to get used to. I don’t want to get sick, as another trip is not far away.

But I did already edited quite a few photos, so the updates here will keep on coming :) For today, here is sunrise shot, taken from the 124th floor of the Burj Khalifa, the At the top visit. Regrettably, the slits in the walls there, are no longer big enough to get the lens through. But I was prepared, and had the Lenskirt with me. With it, I managed to get a nice, reflection free photo through the glass wall. Had to only remove the few glass scratches that were still visible :)

Btw. I you plan a visit, they still allow tripods there, and even my, bigger camera bag was not a problem. Also, the sunrise visit has much fewer people than sunset, they just stay there longer.

This is a two shot blend, one shot for the city, second one for the sunrise.

Palms under the Burj Khalifa

I used the Laowa 12mm F2.8 Zero-D lens quite a lot in Dubai. With a city with so many huge buildings you can always use a ultra wide angle lens, and the wider the better. Same here, right under the Burj Khalifa. I really like the palms at the sidewalk, but I wanted also to have the whole Burj Khalifa in the shot. I wanted to get a nice framing, and also to keep the feeling on how massive the tower is. That’s why I like the perspective distortion here.

It was quite windy the evening I took this, and you may see that on the leafs of the palms. I did do a second shot at a high ISO, planing to mask it in and get rid of the blur. But as it was already quite late in the evening, I had to use ISO over 6400 to stop the movement at all, the results were quite noisy to be useful. So I left it as it was. But somehow it works fine in this shot :)

This is a two exposure blend. The second exposure was only used to darken few highlights in the shot. Edited in Lightroom and Photoshop.