Light up my Life

Over the last few months I have had the pleasure of watching the Dubai Motor Yacht Club take shape. The club opened up for business a few weeks ago and at the same time they decided to turn on the lights. A rather alien like green illuminates the roof, the bridge is lit blue and there are little beacons of lights along the pontoons.

My favourite time of day is just after dusk when there are plenty of people in their apartments and the marina really seems to spring to life. I had some fun this evening with camera and tripod getting some captures.

Here is one looking down the Marina towards Ibn Battuta mall:

Here is another more straight on looking towards Jumeriah Late Towers. The 75 storey diamond trade centre in the background of the picture really sets things off.

This one I liked so much I have decided to make it my new blog banner.  I hope you like it.

All Around The World

A couple of years ago I picked up a little canon point and shoot which has served me well. It has now started to show signs of wear following its regular use and under closer inspection the pictures are clearly not as good as the Nikon D80 I use for more serious photography.

So a little search around the web for a more modern point and shoot camera but with the ability to provide excellent photos led me to a short list of three cameras. The new Canon Powershot G10, the spiffy Panasonic Lumix LX3 and the Nikon Coolpix P6000. All of these cameras offered super high resolutions between 10 mega pixels to 14.7 mega pixels and plenty of manual modes to exert control over the camera. A mooch around the usual suppliers in Dubai showed that the canon had yet to arrive on these shores so it was a straight choice between the Panasonic and the Nikon. The Panasonic build quality is a thing of beauty but the Nikon won me over for a killer feature. Built in GPS. This allows for automatic Geotagging of pictures when the GPS is on. When combined with something like Google maps or Google Earth I can now see exactly where I took a photo (providing I am outside).

I use Picasa to manage my photo collection and those that are Geotagged now have a little compass icon on them and when inspecting the photo properties I now see the following information:

GPS Latitude – 25 5\’0″N

GPS Longitude – 55 9\’0″E

Which illustrates where the photo below of Paul and Stewart was taken last week in Dubai Marina:

The reviews I have read on the P6000 basically says it takes a nice picture but the GPS really drains battery. I well be searching for a couple of spares this weekend but for now I am really impressed.