Back from Dubai
Posted on 07. May, 2008 by Rob in Uncategorized
I’ve been kicking the idea around for a while about turning my hobby into a full-on career and this last week put me quite past the tipping point.
After picking up my first DSLR camera a little over a year ago, I started soaking up as much photography knowledge as possible from the internet. In doing so, I came across the websites of a few photographers who are very generous with sharing their experience, including David Hobby, Chase Jarvis and Joe McNally.
Well, as it turned out, all three of these dudes along with many other notable photographers were going to be in Dubai as instructors for the annual Gulf Photo Plus expo. I had to be there. Arrangements were made.I won’t go into the details of each class I attended, but to say there was a wealth of knowledge, inspiration and experience to be gained would be a vast understatement. I was pretty much blown away with what I took away from the event.As an added extra, all the instructors were staying in our hotel (the most posh Holiday Inn Express you’ll ever see) which led to the fortunate circumstances of meeting many of them for drinks at the hotel bar and a casual breakfast with Joe McNally.To top it off, I managed to make a few new friends. (Cheers Adam, Julian, Nash and Jay). Not bad for 6 days. See Adam and Julian’s blogs for more info and commentary on the workshops.As a random note, David Hobby has a photo of me on his Flickr stream. The shot was taken as I was looking over the day’s images trying to narrow 1,200 shots down to 2 picks for class the next day. The photographers standing around me are Drew Gardner, Chris Hurtt and Scott from Chase’s crew. Talk about pressure.I’ll have more images from the week posted here in due course. I just need a couple days to catch my breath.
(image above taken from the 5th floor Vista Bar at the Internet Village Holiday Inn Express, Dubai)
