Apparently, the best thing to do when photographing a shiny new city like Dubai is to do it with an old 1970s Zenit lens…
Tag: cross-processing
Since I’ve been doing little else, I thought I might as well put up some photos.
The mountains in Dibba
A section of a Dubai road sign
Rental cranes and hooks, Sharjah Industrial Area
Desert flowers
Neon sign, Sharjah
Power lines, Nad al Sheba
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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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It’s been a while since I just did something for the heck of it. Designers usually like to make such work sound important by labeling it a ‘personal project’, but I like to think of it more like a sketch or drawing practice — a Design Doodle!
This piece resulted from a process that is the essence of doodling. There was no plan, no idea, no concept in my head. I simply looked through a random folder of photos I’d taken, picked one, cross-processed it in the GIMP until it looked nice, then imported it into inkscape and went from there. After about an hour of work on it there was a ‘click’ in my head that said it was done, and that was that.
It was stream-of-consciousness design!
I hope to do more of these, probably one a week, maybe more. It always helps to keep practicing, to keep the gears of your mind charged, and client work or large projects can sometimes be too serious for that. It also feels great to start and finish something in one sitting.
Go out and play, just spend and hour doing ‘nothing’ — and you may end up with something you like very much.
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