Photographer’s guide to the best views of Dubai

I’m just back from four days in Dubai, and during that relatively short trip, I tried to capture as many interesting views of Dubai as I possibly could, mainly for stock agencies. I’ve seen fantastic images, as I am sure you have, and I did wonder if those were achievable on my trip. To be honest, I think you would have to be extremely lucky to achieve those images of the tallest buildings rising above the fog at sunrise, but I think it is possible to get some great shots that should sell well on the various agencies. Of course, time will tell.

One of the problematic issues with Dubai is that almost all the buildings are plastered with the names of the developer as you can see above. And not only that, they are brightly lit at night as cast a glow over the building itself and also into the sky around it as the camera struggles to handle the dynamic range. Regular editorial usage is fine, but Adobe Stock, now my best selling agency, only accepts Illustrative Editorial images. The rejections I get from Adobe mention this:

We are looking for imagery intended to illustrate articles on current events and news, focused on conceptual imagery using real brands and products to convey strong ideas.

That would mean that I needed to remove the names from the buildings and try to submit as commercial, which should be OK as long as there are 3 or more buildings in the shot and so it isn’t focusing on one specific building that might have restrictions on it. So far that does seem to be working – shots with a broad range of different names are rejected, but ones where the focus is on one company or brand are accepted, such as this:

They did also accept this, which only really shows one strong company name.

I have a feeling this will be a bit hit and miss, but I am trying to remove names from buildings generally, if I can, and leaving those broader nighttime shots where it is almost impossible to do a good job of removing bright signs as editorial for other agencies.

However, I did run into more issues with Adobe Stock as I uploaded images of the Dubai Downtown district and the Burj al Khalifa. Quite of lot of the images that had this building and some adjacent ones were rejected for Intellectual Property issues even though I had removed the names from the buildings. I have a number that are currently sitting in the “under review” section that are presumably being reviewed by someone more senior perhaps. I have many more still to upload so it will be interesting to see how many Adobe finally accept. I am starting to see some sales already – strangely on BigStockPhoto, which is far from a big seller.

I’ve decided to put the full Photographers Guide to Dubai on my BackyardImage website. So far I have written three of what will be four articles, so check out the link if you are interested in seeing what I saw!