A very happy new year to you all! Let’s hope all the rumours about 2012 aren’t true, and if they turn out to be, let’s hope Bruce Willis or someone sufficiently Bruce Willisian will save us anyway.
Here in Dubai, meanwhile, we kicked things off with a mildly exploding building.
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I recently acquired a new old lens, a Pentax SFX-era F1.4 50mm autofocus from the 1980s. While it is a lens ideally suited for night photography, I recently had the chance to give it a whirl while out and about. Here are a few of the good photos I got.
The Index is one of my favourite buildings to look at in Dubai, and not only because a friend of mine lives there. This Foster & Partners building is perfect for the Dubai landscape, with its pleasingly retro angles and box grater shape, its use of textured materials. And yet it’s completely different to the chrome and glass towers that make up most of the city’s skyscrapers. Chief among them is the Burj Khalifa, tallest building in the world, of-late Tom Cruise’s personal dangling venue of choice. I’m fairly indifferent to its design, though I guess it could have been a lot worse.
Despite the modern image of the Emirates being a glass & chrome metropolis, drive a little out of the city and you’ll end up on a road that looks very much like this, no matter where you go…
…and once you get bored and decide to return to the cities, chances are you’ll end up in a traffic jam that looks very much like this, no matter where you go!
It’s a small concession that once every couple of years, when you do get stuck in a traffic jam you at least get to see some aerobatics. (Also, I really, really need to clean all the dust spots from my camera sensor.)
The lens, by the way, performs admirably, even shooting straight into the setting sun. You can’t see it at this size and treatment, but I can read the number plates on most of the traffic in this shot.
These last two shots further demonstrate how marvelous this lens has turned out to be. Both of them are shot through a very dirty window, with harsh corridor lights behind and above me casting all manner of reflections on the glass. The second one, in fact, was taken at a sharp glancing angle to the glass. It’s a wonder I managed to get anything at all!
Needless to say, I’m only scratching the surface of what this lens can do, and future experiments will follow.
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Still trying to get the hang of the 58mm Zenit lens. Getting better, but need to clean a lot of dust out of it (as seen in the Burj Khalifa shot).
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Apparently, the best thing to do when photographing a shiny new city like Dubai is to do it with an old 1970s Zenit lens…
Of late I’ve been trying to take more photos of the country I live in. After 12 years of living here, and coming from a place like India that is infinitely more visually chaotic, it becomes a bit of an effort to keep boredom from setting in. I can’t say I’m taking better photos here now than perhaps I ever did, and I still yearn for a place that isn’t just desert and buildings and malls, but I’m trying.
Recently I finally looked into this whole
They’re all a bit over the top — nobody said Indians were subtle and I am, in that regard at least, 100% desi — but I do like the strangeness the techniques bring to otherwise bland, brown and grey photos of the UAE. Here’s six more examples.
(Okay, I lied in the title — this one above is actually in Sharjah)
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Possibly the most common sight in Dubai — the tail lights of several cars in front of you, that is. 🙂
Post-processed in the GIMP, using some of the GEGL Black & White Conversion Method I’ve outlined here, while keeping th original colour layer, adding in some more on top and generally freewheeling it until it looked right.
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