Category: Photography

A guy on Reddit who played a role in the fireworks show has posted some behind the scenes shots. The control room looks insane! [Pictures]

Thanks Ali

The Daily Mail has a great collection of photos from last nights fireworks show which you can check out [Here]

A reader was able to take these amazing photos this morning of a street cleaning vehicle on fire near the scientific center.

Photos by Johny Costa

This should be an interesting photography exhibit.

A group exhibition featuring a series of photographs taken by 15 participants of the CAP photography workshop. Led by two members of the Rawiya Collective, Laura Boushnak & Tamara Abdul Hadi, the workshop took place last May in the Mubarakiyah Souq for a duration of two days. It’s main focus was on the old souq, the vendors, the visitors and the stories that can be found in this local public market.

Date: October 10th to 17th, 2012
Location: CAP (Contemporary Art Platform)

The Guardian published the photo above of Kuwait at night taken from space. The photo was one of many photos captured by the European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month. The description of the photo says:

A night view of Kuwait City, the coastal city which serves as Kuwait’s political and economic capital. The metropolitan area has a population approaching 2.5 million

Check out The Guardian article [Here]

Below is another photo taken from space back in August also showing Kuwait at nigh. It was previously featured as a NASA image of the day.

NASA have a pretty good writeup on the photo above as well as a higher resolution photo which you can check out [Here]

Thanks Khalid

My friend who was attending a conference in Doha today snapped the picture above. The photo on the bottom right in that presentation is the one below which I shot back in 2005 at the Kuwait Airport. It’s by far the most popular photo I’ve ever taken since it been making its away around the world popping up in different places as an epic fail photo.

Thanks Alex

Want to help make a difference? Using Instagram take pictures the good, the bad and the ugly and hashtag the shots with #welcometokuwait

Spread the word.

Thursday night I attended the Nikon launch event in Dubai that was held at the Armani Hotel Ballroom. Based on the rumors circulating online I had a feeling they were planning to launch the D600 and that became more of a sure thing when Nikon officially announced it in Thailand a few hours before the Dubai event. The Nikon D600 is an entry level full frame camera and currently the most affordable full frame DSLR you can buy. When they announced it at the Dubai event I was hoping they’d have some display models for us to play with and surely right after the event I found a table with a bunch of D600’s for us to try.

Honestly the first thing I wanted to do is see if I made a mistake by buying the more expensive D800. Originally when I purchased the D800 I did so because I wanted a full frame camera. I wasn’t too interested in the 36MP and if the D800 was even 16MP I would have gotten it. The D600 is a 24MP camera and after playing around with it for a bit I realized it’s physically closer to the D7000. The D600 is smaller and lighter than the D800, and while the D800 has a button layout similar to the larger pro D4, the D600 has a button layout closer to the D7000. I love buttons so that alone was enough to convince me I made the right choice with the D800. DPReview have a very detailed post on the D600 which you can check out [Here]

I personally think the biggest announcement of the night was the fact that Nikon is going to start treating the Middle East like the rest of the world. When a new camera gets released we will now have it at the same time as everybody else. The D600 is going to the be first camera they do this with which is why they had this event on the same day as the worldwide launch. One thing they didn’t mention during the event was the price of the D600, according to Nikon Middle East they haven’t finalized the price yet which was odd since the price of the camera in the the States had been announced a few hours earlier (it’s going to cost $2,100). I am hoping the reason they haven’t finalized the price yet is because Nikon is trying to price the camera for us so that it’s closer to the rest of the world instead of the currently exaggerated pricing we have to deal with because we live in an oil rich region. We’ll have to wait and see.

I’m heading off to Dubai early morning for a Nikon launch event. There are actually two Nikon press events taking tomorrow, one in Thailand and the other in Dubai. According to the rumors Nikon will be announcing the D600 full frame camera tomorrow along with other goodies.

I think there might even be a second camera, maybe a D7000s or something since the invite says:

Nikon is delighted to invite you to a showcase event celebrating the launch of the latest additions to its DSLR range.

The event in Thailand is taking place a few hours ahead of the Dubai one so the surprise will be ruined for us Dubai folks.

Captured the photo below on my way back from Abduliyah this morning. I was driving along the 604 when I spotted a pack of camels crossing in the distance in front of some kind of plant in the backdrop. Any other day it might have looked normal but this morning with the mist (or most likely smog) it looked like something out of the National Geographic so I quickly drove off the road and slamed my brakes. I got out of the car ran to the trunk, got my Nikon D800 out, put on my 80-200mm f/2.8 lens and then ran back to the front of the car so I could quickly get some shots before the camels walked further away from the plant. I managed to get around 6 or 8 shots but right now I like the one above the most. I didn’t retouch it at all just cropped in a lot (thank you Nikon for all 36 megapixels).

I was trying to find information on the Anglo American School of Kuwait and by chance ended up finding a whole bunch of old photos of Kuwait dating back from 1960 up till 1984. I hadn’t seen any of them before and the one that grabbed my attention the most was the one above of a karting track in Ahmadi back in 1964. Most likely the first go-kart track in the region. There are a ton of photos, some are more interesting than others but all help paint a picture of life in Ahmadi back in the 60s and 70s. Check them out [Here]

I’m currently on vacation in Lebanon and get back to Kuwait tomorrow. While here I’ve been taking a lot of great shots of my activities which you can check out on Instagram [Here]

Will be posting in detail about them once I get back.

40 years ago, NASA’s Landsat program launched it’s initial satellite into space (July 23, 1972). Since then the program has been tracking and recording changes on the Earth’s surface via satellite imagery.

Since it’s been 40 years, NASA commemorated the anniversary by selecting and compiling a list of its top ten stories or revealing images which it had stored up during its four decades of existence. One of the stories that made the top 10 was the 1991 Kuwait Oil Fires.

As Iraqi troops withdrew from Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf War, they set fire to over 650 oil wells and damaged many more, just south of the Iraq border (yellow line). These Landsat images show before, during and after the release of 1.5 billion barrels of oil into the environment, the largest oil spill in human history.

You can check out the top 10 stories and images on [WIRED]

I’ve had a love and hate relationship with the Sony NEX-7 even before I got my hands on it. Specs wise the camera is nearly flawless and Sony have somehow managed to fit a ton of great features into a really compact camera… that is until you mount the lens onto it. Thats where the hate comes in. Because the sensor on the Sony is so large, the lenses needed to be large which turned a very slim compact camera without a lens into a not so practical I might as well carry a DSLR size with the lens. In addition to that, the only lens I wanted for it cost as much as the camera itself. But, I’m an open minded person and I change my mind all the time and after trying the camera out it might have.

I picked up the Sony NEX-7K (comes included with a 18-55mm lens) last week from the Sony dealership along with the Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 lens. The Zeiss lens is the one I really wanted to try with the camera and it’s the one I ended up using 95% of the time. The packaging for the camera is one of the nicer ones out there and feels premium right away with the black velvety textured interior and the way the items are laid out. The camera is also solidly built and doesn’t weigh too much even with the lens on which was unexpected. The camera without the lens as I mentioned is very compact and could easily slide into a jeans pocket which makes me wish Sony releases more pancake lenses for the camera (currently they only have the 16mm f/2.8). There are two circular knobs on the back of the camera which are used to control certain options in the camera like aperture, shutter speed and exposure. The viewfinder is electronic but is the first one ever to use an OLED screen which means the blacks are really black. Finally there’s a high resolution tilt’able 3″ screen on the back which tilts down 45° and up 80°.

I took the camera and headed to Souk Mubarkia on Friday afternoon since I wanted to see how easy it would be to capture moving people. I got there as the sun was setting but the weather wasn’t really great and the lighting was very poor and flat. Still, I tried to make the best of it and started walking around snapping pictures. What I like about Souk Mubarkia is that it’s frequented a lot by tourists so the people there are not intimidated by cameras. One of the few places in Kuwait where you can snap away without worrying you’re going to offend anyone. I shot with the camera’s ISO set on Auto since I knew the camera had great ISO capabilities. My favorite feature in the camera has to be the tilt’able screen on the back. Most of my first digital cameras like the Nikon Coolpix 2500 and Sony F717 used to tilt and I used to like that. But lately none of the cameras I’ve purchased had such a feature and until I started using it again on the NEX-7 I had completely forgotten how practical it was. I actually found myself using the rear screen a lot more than the view finder but that might also have been because of the fact people are less aware you’re taking a picture of them when the camera isn’t plastered to your face. The camera is pretty fast and by fast I mean it focuses quickly and shoots instantly which really helped when I was walking around trying to capture certain moments. I did get some blurry shots, maybe around 4 or 5 shots out of a hundred but that mostly had to do with the poor lighting conditions and moving subjects. The Zeiss lens is superb and really is the lens to have for this camera.

I did have some issues with the camera. I was walking around Mubarkia with the camera on and in my hand ready to shoot at any moment, sometimes I’d have two hands holding it sometimes one. When I’d find a shot I’d raise my camera and shoot, thats when I started noticing two annoying issues. The first is the fact I thought the rear knobs were too easy to turn. Every time I put up the camera to shoot I would notice either the exposure compensation shifted or the aperture wasn’t what I had previously set. Maybe I’ve got fat fingers, or maybe I was just holding the camera wrong but if only the knobs were slightly more difficult to turn, that would have made a huge difference with my clumsy hands. The second issue I noticed is when I tried to shoot from my waist (only works with a tilt’able screen). I’d hold the camera with two hands from the sides and then suddenly the rear LCD would go dark for a second or two. It happened a few times before I realized what was going on. The viewfinder has a sensor that detects when the camera is close to your face so it shuts off the screen and turns on the viewfinder. Somehow while holding the camera my thumb was sometimes passing in front of the sensor which was shutting off the screen. Annoying to say the least but by the end of the day I had gotten used to keeping my thumb away from that area.

So is it still a love and hate relationship? The answer isn’t that straight forward. The camera is ridiculously good and if I hadn’t taken the shots myself I would have guessed they were taken with a DSLR and that’s because the NEX-7 is basically a DSLR in a compact body. Where my view on the camera hasn’t changed is with the size. It’s not a compact camera. Yes, it is more compact than a DSLR that’s for sure but it doesn’t compete with Point & Shoots in the same way the Panasonic GX1 or Leica X2 do. The NEX-7 competes against the bigger guys and if you’re looking for DSLR quality but want something in a much smaller package than this is the camera to get. Just don’t expect it to fit in your pocket. The price of the camera with the kit lens is actually pretty good in Kuwait. The local dealer is selling it for KD449 which is not far off from Amazon who are selling it for KD418 without tax and shipping. The Zeiss lens on the other hand which is the must have lens for this camera sadly costs KD515. It’s still not available on Amazon yet although they have a pre-order price of around KD340 without tax and shipping. Even at the Amazon price it’s not easy to dish out a price of a camera on a lens. The most expensive lens I’ve personally purchased is the Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8 for KD200 and that was second hand and it’s really a huge lens with lots of glass. KD340 for a prime lens? Not sure I’d have the courage to pay that.

If you’re interested in checking the camera out Sony have it on display at their Avenues branch although I picked up the review unit from their new branch at Tilal Complex. The next two cameras I’m trying to get my hands on are the Sony RX100 as well as the Olympus OM-D.

Kuwaiti sailors fix the old Kuwaiti flag on a dhow during preparations in Kuwait City on July 11, 2012, for the upcoming annual Pearl Diving Festival, meant to honor the nation’s former trade mainstay.

Kuwait’s on the main page of cnn.com under “Daily Snapshot” [Link]