Landscape shots from the UAE.... for which I was arrested!

There a bit orange Haley, probably caused by the street lights. You could fix that in PP but unfortunately the blown highlights are probaly unfixable.

Why were you arrested, they dont strike me as being particularily sensitive areas.
 
Hayley,

They all could to varying degrees use a shorter shutter speed, as some highlights are badly burnt out. Afraid its a matter of trial and error but you need some more 'true' blacks in the pictures. Modern lighting can be incredibly bright.

Do be careful what and where you photograph. I thought it was only in Britain where Police paranoia about photographers existed.
 
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Burj Al-Arab is private property and I didn't have permission from the owner (given I've never met any members of the Maktoum family that would be a bit difficult...). UAE has become more sensitive to photographers over the last couple of years but they're usually ok, just copped a bad tempered one that evening :)

Thanks for the comments - yes, always difficult to get rid of the 'yellow' in the Gulf and the neon plays havoc with white balance etc. Definitely need to find somewhere I can practice without being busted!
 
Like the time I was told you couldn't photograph this guy on a market because it would be like stealing his soul. Yeah right. Except he was prepared to sell his soul numerous times by crossing his palm with gold coloured English coins. Double standards or what?
 
Nice compositions, especially 1 and 3. Although the highlights are blown, particularly in 2.

With such extreme dynamic range, I always blend multiple exposures of these types of shot (manually not HDR). If they were shot in RAW you should be able to make multiple adjustments to the exposure of these and blend 2 or 3 versions, which will help ring back some detail in the highlights.

I don't find white balance cards so useful under mixed urban lighting, and prefer to tweak it in PP until it looks right. Shouldn't be too difficult to remove much of the orange cast in these, which will improve them significantly.
 
Since you have that its ok to edit your images, I tried it on the first image, Im not very good at setting the WB inside of photoshop itself, but by saving it as a TIFF and then bringing it back into Camera Raw, I have some limited options to change the WB

Untitled-1 by Carl@CDHPIX, on Flickr

Hopefully you saved them in RAW (y)
 
holls1969 said:
Yes, that's correct. I was arrested for taking the shot of the Burj Al-Arab last month. Funny now, not so much then... Would love any comments on these :)View attachment 35077 View attachment 35078 View attachment 35079 ?
Click to expand...

Photoshop CC has a handy feature allowing you back into Camera Raw with a filter on any photo , no idea what the original scene looked like but heres a best guess with some tweaking in ACR

ac.jpg
 
Bad luck on your police experience Hayley.
Like others here I've not had problems in the past...though it's been a few years since I was last in Dubai.
I like your compositions, and agree that you should be able to correct the hue issue in PP.

@Carlh What an edit! Really lovely.
@Andrew Davies Photography ...another cracking edit.
 
I had a go but think that making it too 'pale' defeats the object of it being a night shot.



v32bds.jpg
 
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Good photos to build experience though. You'll be more careful with white balance and blown highlights as welll as where you put your tripod.

I like the composition as well as the different PP.
 
Thanks for all of your useful comments/edits and feedback. It was actually really, really dark (sky was black) but the neon and reflections against the white stonework really threw out the White Balance. Always fun to play around with tho!
 
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