landscape

I took pictures of rocks, and also some buildy things. Then I messed around with them in the GIMP. It was fun.

How exactly do you turn the dull, boring image on the left into the one on the right? Easy, read on for the tutorial!

Oddly enough, despite the Dubai Mall being open for over a year now, I have never taken my Pentax SLR out in it to snap a few shots.

But today when my friend Amit was in town (we were meeting after 15 years despite living the the same city for much of that time -- and that's a whole 'nother story), he asked me to bring along the 'fancy camera' to take some touristy shots. Since I rarely take touristy shots, I was looking forward to the challenge! :)

And wouldn't you know it, the batteries were flat and I didn't have time to recharge them. Lucky for me the Pentax K200D uses four ordinary AA batteries, so I was able to get up and running after a quick stop at a gas station convenience store for some alkalines.

Literally the first shot I took, seconds after popping the batteries in was the one above. It's not a great shot, but you do get to see a Dubai metro station in the foreground, and once again the speed of an SLR -- nearly as good as instant response of the film cameras I cut my teeth on -- amazed me.

Later in the evening we found ourselves in the Dubai Mall, outdoors near the fountain. I got one half-decent shot of the fountain, below, which I can't decide is bad because of the column obscuring it, or likable precisely because of that rogue column in the way. Such is the way with photographs, sometimes.

Needless to say, I need to go back with a tripod someday (of course, first I need to find a tripod that can steadily hold my beast of a camera).

Then followed several unsuccessful attempts at taking shots of the nearly-finished Burj Dubai, all of which were blurry (including one with a borrowed tripod). Finally I managed to get a good, properly composed shot by employing a trick I learnt from the esteemed Samir Bharadwaj -- I leaned against one of the same offending columns that had earlier come between me and the fountain.

All was forgiven between me and that piece of decorative architecture, because it helped me get this shot below:

And that, along with an excellent evening of good food and laughter with friends of old (and some new ones too), made the evening quite worth it.

V

A while ago on a drive through Fujairah and the Northern Emirates I took a bunch of photos of the landscape from the car. It was a nice enough day, but far too grey and harsh, and I didn't think any of the photos were any good.

A few days ago I was looking through those same photos before archiving them to DVD, and tried playing around with some of the levels. Lo and behold, the peculiar, lovely color of Kodak cameras came into play, and the pictures were suddenly pretty good!

So here are fifteen of the best. You should keep in mind that the day didn't look like this -- but hey, who cares now, the pictures came out good. Enjoy.

(These three were taken in Oman last July)

V