The other Burj Al Arab
Before I get to today’s photograph, I just wanted to talk a little bit about an event I just attended about 2 hours ago. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts this week was the week of the yearly GPP event here in Dubai that sees photographers from all over the world descending in the desert with a great set of workshops to suit just about anybody interested in photography. This year I only attended the Flash Bus workshop with Joe McNally and David Hobby. This was very interesting, but not exactly what I wanted to talk about.
To mark the end of the week-long event for the last three years the guys and girls and GPP have been running a photo shoot-out between some of the teachers and this year the participants were David Hobby, Martin Prihoda and Gregory Heisler. The subject of the shoot-out is always revealed at the last moment and the photographers have 20 minutes to come up with a shot that gets judged by the audience. Today’s subject was a self-portrait. Great theme, that would make anybody think quite a bit about how to achieve it. The self-portrait had to represent who the photographer is and both David Hobby and Martin Prihoda came up with some great shots. David did an iPhone / iPad lit self-portrait, while Martin Prihoda impressed with some very cool light painting. But then we were all silenced and blown-away at the same time. Mr. Heisler himself mentioned that he is very self-conscious in front of the camera so he came up with a mind-blowing conceptual shot in which a large format camera was covered by his hat and was shot through his glasses in order to represent himself. I took a quick snap with my iPhone here, but I’m sure the guys at GPP will post it online soon. Oh, and this was just one shot. No test shots, no nothing! Pure genius!
After that, I have a hard time talking about the photo below, but it’s an interesting landmark that somehow really reminds me of Dubai. This is a structure that was build in Lisbon for the world expo ’98 and that almost seems like a pre-drawing of the Burj Al Arab. I’m not quite sure if there is a connection between the architects, but the resemblance is striking hence the title I choose for this post. I was lucky with a beautiful sunset when I photographed this and as you will notice by looking at the original (just hover over the image) I’ve only used a couple of curves to bump up the contrast a bit.