Dubai Jeopardy

I have been having trouble explain my current plans and situation to my friends (or come to that, myself, at times!) so I shan't even attempt to do so here - but suffice it to say I have said an emotional farewell to the beautiful city of Edinburgh and have recently spent a month in Dubai. I have had a wonderful 10 years in Edinburgh taking pictures but it is time for a change, at least for now.

Dubai is most certainly a change! The city seems to rise out of the desert one building at a time, all entirely independent of one another and fighting for space like saplings in a forest. Not so much streets as skyscraper territories that happen to be close to one another; loosely connected by freeways and sudden tarmac roads apparently draped directly onto the sand, few pavements (little drainage, come to that, but I guess it barely rains...) just floating on the burning dust. The buildings themselves are spectacular - everywhere something new and enormous and awesome is rising in the heat. Hard to imagine how, when it is too hot to walk past them, let alone work out in the sun among the iron trunks and vicious glazing. The construction workers here are a breed apart - silent, slow moving, eyes that follow you the same as any workie at home but with this astonishing ability to labour in the tyrannical heat. Strikes me as hard to really appreciate the skyscrapers though - the scarcity of 'normal' sized buildings to give scale and the distorting haze of heat and dust contort my impressions such that I have to remind myself how huge they are.

June is a poor time to be in Dubai - especially for a photographer; the heat is too much to appreciate the outdoors for any more than 10 minutes and even the hardy, well-made heft of the D3 is vulnerable in this crushing sun. Not to mention the brash, contrasty light. So unfortunately, I haven't yet seen Dubai Creek and the old town, or several other sights yet (next time!) and the only time I really took my camera out was at night. Even then we found ourselves at the Malls - I am an unusual breed of female in that I really don't like shopping - but they really are one of the main attractions in Dubai, especially at this time of year when air-con is even more important!
Plus, even I have to admit that they are much more that just shopping malls - ice rinks, an aquarium the size of a ferry and an actual ski slope are some examples!! As long as one avoids thinking about the levels of consumption: designer goods, human labour and horrifying levels of CO2 then the malls are certainly a sight to behold.

So, my photo examples are both taken from a shopping mall - the newest in Dubai and largest in the world - although the views are of the building next door; The Burj Khalifa (I'm sure you'll be amazed to learn that that is also the largest in the world.... specifically the tallest tower in the world at 828m). In this first one I was looking for some contradiction - the startling modernity of the tower with a touch of old Arabia. Old Arabia is pretty tricky to find in this very newest part of Dubai however so I had to settle for some retro architectural detailing on the Souk al Bahaar side of the mall; an area that is designed to hint at the aesthetic past of the region. I think it still works as a visual contradiction though... what do you think?

This next one is also the Burj Khalifa (incidentally, they renamed it just before it was opened - it was going to be the Burj Dubai - after Sheikh Khalifa of Abu Dhabi, who came up with the finance after it got into trouble. I could handle being rich and powerful enough to have skyscrapers named after me... *sigh*).

This time the tower is not itself the star of the piece but it provides scale and structure to the water display. Spectacular fountain show every night at the Dubai Mall - fountains of light, water and sound shooting 3 storeys into the air in perfect sync to the music; and I saw many different shows to many different styles of music too. Whatever I think about Dubai. I certainly can't knock the place for effort - everything they do has to be perfect. Biggest, most impressive, most...

So here it was a case of finding the right angle and location, focussing manually to avoid the dreaded autofocus hunt in the dark and amongst the moving water then experimenting with shutter speeds. Constant moving water (like a waterfall or river) is a bit easier than this sort of thing - take a guess at a reasonable shutter speed to give you the level of water blur you want and tweak as required - but here the water is moving at different speeds all the time so a bit more experimentation can be required. Then it's a question of picking your moments and shooting a few frames at a time as fast as your frame rate will let you! And, in my case, muttering under the breath about bringing a proper tripod instead of creating one out of camera bag, strap and railing....