Indeed, I did. I got up just after 05:00, made a pot of coffee, and carried my gear up to the roof. I live in a 31 story building on Sheikh Zayed Road, the main thoroughfare through Dubai, the one you see in the marketing and promotional materials, the one with the long row of skyscrapers. At 31 stories, though, our building is rather dwarfish.
I had the good fortune to work on the same day as the cleaners, a group of Bangladeshis rappelling down the face of the building with high pressure water guns, so there was a chance to chat and photograph something other than landscapes.
I wrote earlier in the week about my scouting visit to the roof, so there is no need to go into the details of the preliminaries again. I had planned two set-ups, which are marked in red as lines-of-sight on the map below. While I was up there, I started doing another, marked in green. The orange line is the approximate path of the sun. Altogether I took 349 photos, the first shot at 05:23, the last at 19:22. (That comes to 15 hours on the roof! It's not as bad as it sounds since during the middle of the day I went up for 10 minutes each hour.)
Sunrise was 06:18, sunset 18:31.
Most shots were taken in Auto mode, though in the evening hours I switched to manual because Auto was overexposing. I stepped down ISO from 2500 or 3200 to 800, increased aperture and slowed down shutter speed to get richer exposures.
The first set-up was on tripod, which I had to elevate to be able to shoot over the building's wall and capture the mosque in the foreground. There was a bit of wind, my tripod is made of lightweight aluminum, and so variation in the images occurred as a result of movement.
I think because I was hurrying to get everything set up I didn't have time to appreciate the nuance of color at sunrise that I did at sunset. You can see how many more photos at close intervals I took at the end of the day. And I was actually surprised to find after being on this earth 52 years and being witness to thousands of sunsets, until yesterday I never noticed how the fading evening light forms a slowly shrinking semi-circle. Perhaps because I never had the perspective of 114 meters.
While it may appear from the above series more is happening in the evening than in the morning, this can be explained by the position of the sun, which was at my back in the morning, and in my face in the evening. Had the subject been in the opposite direction, there might have been more variation in color and more opportunities for morning photos.
With the sun behind, it appears there is is an approximately 20 minute window of dramatic light. For another 30 minutes after there is a cool blue cast that quickly turns to an orange about an hour after sunrise.
Between 10 and 17 there doesn't appear to much change to the light, though shadows do move in relation to the movement of the sun.
This is a set I hadn't planned for. It wasn't until 11:00 or noon that I got the idea, which is why there is a gap in the morning photos between 06:30 and 11:00. Perhaps most obvious here is the washed out sky when the sun is overhead between 11:00-12:00, slowly becoming a deeper blue, then at sunset losing most color (the image at 18:29 was shot with Shade WB and so has a stronger orange cast) before becoming black.
The next set was also done hand-held. I have explained why in my previous post, but here you can see for yourself. I haven't bothered to correct the images in this set because, well, it's already taken me a full day to go through all of yesterday's photos, add the time stamp, upload them here and write this description. I should note that the only post processing applied to any of the photos in this exercise is sharpening. Exposures are as captured.
The morning started off with a few scattered clouds and diffuse light. Many of the building lights seem to stay on past sunrise, so much of the noticeable sparkle comes from these, and not the sun. By 06:40, about 30 minutes after sunrise, sunlight glints off the towers and just before 07:00 the buildings are bathed in soft orange sunlight. About one hour after sunrise shadows of the buildings are visible across the road. By 10:00 the angle of the sun looks to be directly behind the buildings, creating a distinct line of shadows. These shadows then slowly recede, colors become bright, and the road is completely bathed in light from overhead. As the sun moves off to the right, shadows from buildings on the opposite side of the street begin to emerge and move across the road and the buildings begin to sparkle with afternoon sunlight. Following the the glow of sunset at 18:30, the sky loses color and begins to darken. Lights come on and the road takes on an orange hue. The sky turns black and the road becomes yellow.
This has been the most time consuming exercise I've yet done on this course. It has taken all of one weekend, plus a couple hours of a third morning. It has also been rewarding, not only in the chance to observe the movement and play of sunlight, but also in learning how to plan for an intensive shoot, and in learning a little more about my camera. I didn't know until yesterday that one of the modes on the dial is Auto-No-Flash. I don't know what I thought that might have been. I don't remember thinking much about it. I do remember getting awfully frustrated every time I used Auto in low light and the flash popped up. Now I know how to keep it off!
One last image before I close this, something I found while climbing about on the roof. The probably belong to a pigeon, as that's what we have most of around here.
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