Here’s a shot I took from the beach at dusk last night, right when the Burj Al Arab hotel’s beautiful exterior lighting came on (the hotel itself is the world’s tallest, at just over 1,050 feet tall).
For the first few minutes, they did a little light show (complete with white sweeping search lights on the heli-pad ), where it displayed a number of different solid colors on the front of the hotel (as shown below), but then for just a few moments it showed this multi-color look and I kept firing until it went away and returned to solid red for the next 15 to 20 minutes. By then it was getting so dark, I had to pack it in.
To me, the photos almost look like an illustration—-more like a 3D rendering rather than a photo, which is kind of weird, but I saw it with my own eyes, and well…that’s what it looked like. I included some of the other colors below, captured unretouched from Lightroom’s Library, so you can see what the other colors looked like.
The shot at top was taken with a Nikon D3, on a Gitzo Traveler tripod with a Really Right Stuff BH-40 ballhead. It was shot with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 70mm (this entire trip I’ve had the wrong lens on my camera at the right time—I had to limp way, way, way down the beach to fill the hotel (the world’s tallest hotel) in the frame without clipping off the top or bottom).
GPS: I had the di-GPS unit for Nikon cameras attached to my camera, so it automatically embedded the GPS position info for where I took the shot into the file. To see a satellite photo of the exact spot where I took the shot you see above, click here.
There’s very little Photoshop work here, I just increased the contrast a little; I darkened the edges a bit, and added an Unsharp Mask. The exterior lighting was already so colorful, that I really couldn’t do too much. I have all of about 30-seconds in it.
NOTE: My brother Jeff and Jeff Revell were closer in shooting wide, but a security guard from the hotel went down almost immediately and stopped them from shooting because (in the security guard’s words), they did not have permission from the hotels PR dept. to shoot the hotel (this was only because they were using the most evil of photographic devices—a tripod). People were shooting the hotel all over the beach, and in the driveway, and a dozen other locations near them, but they were all hand-holding, so they were “OK.” Well, apparently I limped beyond the reach of hotel security, because they never came out to where I was shooting, and I got the shot you see above.
