Zeiss Infinity Tour - Dubai

Reaching The Skies

Dubai holds a special place in my photography journey. It is where I turned my passion into my profession, and where architecture and cityscape photography became central to my work.

When I photographed the city for the ZEISS Infinity Tour in 2017, I had been living here for four years. Yet its skyline continued to give me reasons to look again. From street level to elevated viewpoints, the relationship between buildings, light and scale offered a constant source of inspiration.

A City Reaching for the Sky

If I had to choose the subject I photographed most in Dubai, it would be its skyscrapers. In some parts of the city, they seem to compete for space in the sky, each building adding its own shape and character to the view.

My interest goes beyond their height. I look at how buildings relate to one another, how their façades respond to light and how a change in viewpoint alters the composition.

From the ground, a tower can dominate the frame. From a rooftop, it becomes part of a wider landscape of roads, neighbourhoods and architecture extending towards the horizon.

Photographing Dubai from Above

Rooftop photography offers a perspective that is difficult to experience from the streets below. The city opens up, revealing patterns and connections between buildings that are less apparent at ground level.

Reaching those viewpoints takes preparation. Arranging permission and access was an important part of our rooftop photography, and being in position when the conditions came together was another challenge.

The viewpoint alone does not make the photograph. Light, visibility and composition all influence how the skyline appears, even from a location I have visited many times.

When Fog Transforms the Skyline

Some of my most memorable mornings in Dubai have been spent photographing fog.

As it moves between the buildings, familiar views change. Roads and lower structures disappear, while the tops of towers emerge above the clouds. The skyline becomes simpler in some places and more mysterious in others.

These conditions bring a different rhythm to the work. An opening may reveal a building for a few moments before the fog covers it again. I watch closely, adjusting the frame as the scene changes.

For me, the attraction is the relationship between nature and architecture. The buildings remain fixed, but the fog continually reshapes how we see them.

Sharing the Rooftop Experience

During our rooftop workshops, Daniel Cheong and I shared this perspective with photographers at different stages of their practice.

Working together on location gave participants an opportunity to explore the skyline and develop their own compositions. Even with the same view in front of us, each photographer could find a different relationship between the buildings, light and atmosphere.

Those sessions were also a chance to exchange ideas. I have always valued the conversations that happen while photographing, when looking at s

Accessing rooftops in Dubai is actually rather difficult. Getting a permit is the hard part, and being there at the right moment is challenging. The seasons still change up on the rooftops, and during the few months of fog all the rooftopper photographers in the city don’t get any sleep. Dubai skies don’t usually offer many clouds, so the fog season is every rooftopper's dream. Thanks to this special weather, you get the chance to take incredible photos showing how nature smoothly embraces the massive skyscrapers.

Yet Dubai rooftops also offer you the magnificent skyline and architecture of the young city. As a photographer, I document those gigantic buildings competing to reach the sky – in the city of a thousand skyscrapers.

In our rooftopping workshops, Daniel Cheong and I want to offer beginners and professionals the opportunity to experience and capture the vast landscape from Dubai’s rooftops. Somehow these moments make infinity tangible. Particular striking, as Daniel mentioned when I asked him, is the correlation of size from big to small - moving from the universe to micro worlds. It’s always a pleasure to meet him and to get inspired by his character and his attitudes.

Finding Infinity in Scale

As part of the ZEISS Infinity Tour, I asked Daniel what infinity meant to him. He spoke about the relationship between the very large and the very small, from the universe to microscopic worlds.

His perspective felt relevant to the view from a Dubai rooftop. Individual details form part of a building, buildings form part of a city, and the city stretches beyond the boundaries of the photograph.

A frame can contain only a small part of that scene. Choosing where it begins and ends becomes a way of exploring scale, depth and the sense of something continuing beyond what we can see.

The City That Shaped My Work

Dubai marked a turning point in my professional life. It gave me the opportunity to build a career around photography and develop a deeper interest in the built environment.

Photographing its skyline has taught me to keep observing familiar places. A shift in light, a layer of fog or a different viewpoint can reveal something I had not noticed before.

That is what continues to draw me back: the opportunity to find a new photograph in a city that has become home.