Category: Dubai

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Downtown Dubai at night


Night view of Dubai skyline, featuring tall skyscrapers and vibrant city lights against a dark sky. In the foreground are the orange and white light trails from many passing cars on dozens of curving lanes of highway roads.

In the heart of downtown Dubai two major highways intersect. Sheikh Zayed Road and Financial Ctr St. Behind this massive intersection is the world’s tallest building the Burj Khalifa. It is surrounded by huge hotels. This was the view from the 36th floor of the Shangri-La Dubai hotel looking south. It’s one of the best skyline views of Dubai I have captured so far. I do need to work on a way to reduce glare and reflections when photographing through windows. The vertical version of this image includes a lot more of the light trails on the roads below.



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Ameca humanoid robot

A robot with a grey humanoid face stands in a room with a white wall behind.

Ameca is a robotic humanoid created in 2021 by Engineered Arts in the UK. I photographed them at the Museum of the Future in Dubai. There were a number of people interacting with them so I didn’t get much time for a conversation, just this portrait. Ameca has a grey rubber skin on the face and hands. They are specifically designed to appear genderless. I’m not sure I’m ready for AI to have a physical human looking presence but this could be the future. Or at least one possible future. To me it seems strange to make the robots facial features (like their mouth and eyes) look and move in a human way but then give them a semi transparent skull with a light inside. No doubt many people are working on the next versions of Ameca. If you would like to meet Ameca I believe they now reside at the National Robotarium in Edinburgh.

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DNA Library at Museum of the Future


A dark room filled with an array of colourful lights in glass tubes. In the foreground there are three tubes in focus, each containing a purple object. The background has hundreds of mostly green dots of light.

This was on of the most visually unusual libraries I have photographed. There were no books. It’s on the fourth level of the Museum of the Future in Dubai. Walking into a large dark room, filled with coloured lights. At first it is hard to know what you are looking at. There are 2400 crystal specimen jars suspended in mid air. Each jar displays a specimen of the flora, fauna and animals in the library. In the three jars I’ve focused on in this photograph we can see what I think are jellyfish lit up in purple. I could be wrong though. I thought that the purple contrasted well against the mostly green lights in the background.

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Museum of the Future at night

A stunning night view of Dubai, showcasing the city illuminated by vibrant lights against a dark sky.

I nearly passed on this photograph. Earlier that day I had flown into Dubai from Manchester, then spent a few hours exploring inside the museum. Having photographed the Museum of the Future in the daytime I was happy with what I had seen. However I knew at night this building was lit up. It was a 20 minute walk along Sheikh Zayed Road. I am so glad I went back. Not at first. That street light was so bright and I couldn’t capture an image without it. So rather than Photoshoping or cropping close I chose to include the bright orange light. Waiting for a Dubai Metro train to come along from the right in front of the building. This ended up being a 2.5 second long exposure. It was quite dark by the time I had walked down here. Darker than I would have liked for this scene. But I had been down the road, capturing an even more epic view of downtown Dubai, that I’m sure I’ll share here soon.