Long Exposure Dubai Skyline

First Few Days in Dubai

We arrived in the concrete jungle of Dubai on Friday afternoon and haven’t stopped shooting since. From winding junctions and terrifying buildings, to one of the most beautiful religious buildings in the world, our cameras have rarely worked so hard.

It has all been made possible by the guys at UAE Landscapers, in particular Prakash Singh and Rustam, who have organised everything!

Not only is this city the most photogenic city I’ve ever seen, it also interesting to see the fierce competition between photographers here for locations.  Everyone seems to have a ‘friend’ in one location or another, who can grant them access to rooftops. Sometimes a moderate bribe is also necessary.

I look forward to the next few days. Hopefully we’ll continue to find beautiful spots, and familiarise ourselves even more with this interesting, and very welcoming photography community.

In the meantime, I have an informal workshop coming up on Thursday on Digital Blending techniques. It should be a lot of fun.

Workflow Explanation – Long Exposure Dubai Skyline

To learn my post-processing techniques, feel free to check out my courses: The Art of Digital Blending & The Art of Cityscape Photography

This was actually taken from our balcony. We chose this apartment specifically for the view. We had no idea that we’d be presented with such a generous amount of clouds on our first morning. Since Dubai has around 330 of cloudless skies, this is a big deal, although we didn’t realise it until the locals pointed it out.

I created this with two exposures. The main exposure was 121 seconds long. The second exposure was shot 20 minutes earlier, at blue hour.  I blended the two in Photoshop, so that the city lights were super-imposed onto the long exposure shot.

Before that, however, I edited the long exposure in Adobe Camera RAW. I brought the highlights right down, lifted the shadows slightly, and moved the temperature slider to the right. This helped to remove the typical blue case created by the ND filter.

There was a fair bit of barrel distortion, most of which I corrected using Lens Correction in Photoshop.

To increase texture in the clouds, and brighten the buildings slightly, I used the pro contrast filter in NIK Color Efex, and also added a slight vignette with the Darken/Lighten Center filter.

To finish, I added a Levels layer to increase overall contrast, but some of the sky became over exposed. Using Brights 2 luminosity mask, I was able to restore the blown out highlights without any problems. You can download my luminosity mask actions here: Free luminosity mask actions download

Before/After post-processing