Bernard, Vikas, Sally, Jonathan and I met up for a bit of night photography in one of the old markets in Bur Dubai. Surprisingly the weather was quite tolerable. Once the sun went down, it cooled down to 33 degrees (centigrade) and the wind help to cool us down even further. The market was full of barbershops, material shops, tailors, butchers, cobblers, supermarkets, mom and pop stores selling a wide variety of wares. It was surprisingly bright due the large number of florescent lighting in and around all the store fronts. We walked around for about 2 hours including a 20 min pit stop at a local juice bar. It was quite a lot of fun and we are hoping to repeat the experience. In terms of the images shot, we experimented with a variety of camera and lens and shooting modes. Jonathan was shooting with a Leica / 50 mm f2.5, Sally had a nikon and Vikas was shooting with a Mark3D. Bernard and I were shooting with the Fuji XT. As usual, he had the 55-200 lens while I was shooting with the kit lens ( I did carry my 55 m along but didn't get the chance to try it out). It was interesting to compare our approaches. He shot in very close while I shot wide so we had different perspectives of the same scene. For example, when I shot this image, he shot this one.
There was a lot of contrast created due to the bright lights and the dark backgrounds. I decided that in processing the images I would try and simulate the Kodak T400 black and White film adjusted for a bit of less grain than what one would have found on if shooting with the actual film. It's a bit more of a dramatic high contrast look and not something that I have tried before. I am still of two minds on whether I like the digital processing or not. There was a lot of storefront and reflections that had to be incorporated in the images. In some case, they added to the drama and in some cases they really were a pain to deal with. There are quite a few shooting and processing challenges that need to be mastered in night street photography.
I am definitely going to go back and shoot more street in Bur Dubai at night.