Tilting and shifting
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last couple of days, you would have heard that Dubai has just won the right to host the World Expo 2020, which at least from a photography point of view, will prove to be really interesting as I’m sure we will get to see even more outrageous architecture being brought to life in this desert land.
To celebrate the occasion, I wanted to post a shot of an older Dubai landmark (old here is a very loosely used word – 10-15 years is almost ancient!) and I settled for the Burj Al Arab. I took this shot during the blue hour and night photography workshop I was running for GulfPhotoPlus on Saturday and if you haven’t worked it out yet, it was shot with a 24mm tilt-shift lens that allowed me to really choose my focus point, while throwing the rest of the scene out of focus. I liked what this did to the strong lights on the left side of the frame as I think it makes them slightly less distracting.
Another place where I ended up talking quite a bit about tilt-shift lenses was at the presentation I gave to the Emirates Photography Club (EPyC) on Tuesday as the talk was focused mostly on interior photography. Proper interior photography is very difficult to do without tilt-shift lenses and although these can be very expensive, if you are really interested in this field, at least rent one for the weekend to understand how does it work. The EPyC crowd was really welcoming and we ended up having a great discussion about the challenges of being a full-time commercial photographer. Anyone is welcomed in their group so if you want to meet like-minded people with an interest in photography have a look on their Facebook page.