Finding a Different Viewpoint

Last time I was in Dubai this amazing, rocket-shaped building was called the Burj Dubai. Apparently it's now called the Burj Kalipha - because the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the Caliph, has loaned the country a small sum to help dig developers out of the poo.
Nice to have rich mates.  That's a cool headliner - exclusive naming rights on an 880metre building!

In the past I've photographed this building from a number of different positions, and in varying degree of light conditions. But however good or bad the shooting conditions, it's always a good idea to look for a different viewpoint, especially when it's a subject that's familiar to a lot of people. The local publicity and press show an immaculate building against a pure blue background. Anyone that has visited Dubai will know this atmospheric clarity is a rare occurrence because, most of the time, there's a lot of dust in the atmosphere. Either from the construction (which seems to be going ahead again after the GFC scare, or from a dust storm coming in from the desert.

All the pictures that you see here were shot on the same day as I wandered around the massive new Dubai mall shopping complex - as shopping centres go it's quite impressive, although it's really just full of the same stuff you see in every other shopping centre.

The task I had set myself was to find different or 'new' angles of an already familiar landmark. Although I started out shooting similar pictures that a million other people have taken, I found the best results happened when I stood in the shade and included a part of the roof line from another building or awning.
All the colour shots are HDR, made up from three two-stop exposures on my EOS 5D MkII using the 24-70mm f2.8 L series lens. No tripod, processed in Photomatix Pro. The black-and-white shot is also an HDR creation but this was post-processed using the mononchrome enhancer in Topaz Labs Detail plug-in for Photoshop.