Let me shoot you.... please?

Last week, I went for the Gulf Photo Plus, an event showcasing the best photographers around the world. I have been dabbling in photography for the last 2-3 years and I was excited at the prospect of meeting the giants in the photography business. So I enrolled for a few workshops, one of them being the “one light” workshop by Zack Arias, who is an Atlanta based editorial photographer.

I started following his blog once I enrolled for his class and I was fascinated by his use of flash lighting. If I had to choose something that I was entirely clueless about in photography that would have been the flash unit. I hate using the flash pop up on the top of my camera, which makes anyone who I shoot, have oily white skin and flared features. Ugly. Using a flash unit separate from the camera was akin to rocket science for me. I knew it would fire, but I just didn’t how the h*** it worked, and the manual looked like it was written by geeky MIT grads. Reading through his blog, I slowly started getting used to the idea of me being able to use a flash without going back for algebra classes.

I reached the venue for the workshop 30 minutes early. It was a bustle of activity with people of different age groups, ethnicity rushing about in search of their classrooms. I walked around the main venue where various photography related stalls were set up, stalls for Nikon, Canon, Adobe dominated the area.

The workshop had two sections to it, a theory section for four hours, enlightening but a relentless barrage of information can fuddle your brains. The next section was more fun, we had a photo session with three models in the new technique he had taught us, and surprise, surprise I can shoot with a flash! I would have put up the link to my flickr account here. But Flickr is banned in Dubai. So I would have had to scour for the second best photo sharing site and upload all my snaps there again. Currently that is too much of a hassle.

This place is such a wonderful city to photograph people. Such diversity in culture, a whirlpool of people from around the world. The fashion sense of people here is extremely unique to say the least. Sometimes you feel that you are on Fifth Avenue, sometimes you feel you are in the ghetto, and sometime you just don’t know which planet you have landed upon. Most probably the per capita investment in cosmetic enhancement would be the highest here. My trigger finger gets awfully itchy whenever I step into one of those swanky malls. It is like Disney land; wonders wherever you look.