Dubai: Stunning Dynamic Timelapse Photography

Dubai is a truly incredible city. It contains some of the most glorious skyscrapers, including the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world which is shown multiple times throughout the video, but most predominantly at 1:32. The piercing blue waters and myriad of colorful lights contribute to the breathtaking scenery that rivals that of any major U.S. city:

In this timelapse, Duabi almost looks like an unreal place. The skyscrapers look like something described in a sci-fi book, and the colors have a punch that you typically only see in comics. The railway rides in particular make you feel like this is something out of the future. But Dubai is no fairy tale city. It’s simply an amazing feat of human engineering, a feature which this timelapse does an amazing job of capturing. It shows the power and grace of the city, and also how small we are in the grand scale of things, even though it is us who create cities in the first place.

This is an example of a great timelapse. When you stop thinking about the technical aspects of how it was captured and get absorbed into the subject matter, when it makes you think about or feel something, that’s when you know you’ve captured something amazing.

Burj Khalifa tallest builing dubai night

Burj Khalifa: Tallest building in the world

Equipment Used for These Sequences:

dubai surreal city

At first glance you might think this was an artist’s rendering rather than a real place

For Further Training on Time-lapse Photography:

Check out this new COMPLETE guide (146 pages) to shooting, processing and rendering time-lapses using a dslr camera. It can be found here: Time-lapse Photography Guide

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