Photographing the Ain Dubai and Jumeirah in Dubai

And finally, we come to the last episode in my Photographers Guide to Dubai series. The initial one introducing Dubai can be found here. A very hectic 4-day visit in early April gave me the opportunity to see many different districts of this fascinating city, and also gave me almost 450 images that have been uploaded to the agencies that distribute my work. You can see the images I produce for these agencies here on Backyard Stock Photos. I’ve also put my favorites, that I think would be interesting as wall art, here in my Pictorem portfolio where you will find free shipping and a 30-day money back guarantee.

This final article completes the tour of the BlueWater island with its massive Ferris wheel known as the Ain Dubai. Standing at 250m (820 feet) high, it is (naturally) the tallest and largest Observation Wheel in the world. It is hard to believe that it carries 1750 passengers in 48 cabins but has been out of action for 12 months for “improvements”. This is how I saw it from my final hotel in Dubai:

Pretty fascinating during the day, but as the sun starts to set, it takes on a new life with a dazzling light show.

With having a balcony overlooking this scene, I was also able to use my tripod to create videos of these various stages of the evening and those are now online. I think this is my favorite one:

I was able to stay in the hotel room until the early evening and so freed from my bags, I decided to make the trek (by taxi to start) to the Souk Madinat Jumeirah, which is a very distinctive mall, restaurant area and gathering place near the famous Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s most iconic hotel with its reputed “7 stars”. As I noted in previous articles, I had usually taken Uber cars on my trips because they are so trouble free, but on this journey there was a taxi right outside the hotel. Once we were underway, he asked which way I wanted to go – of course, I had no idea how to answer this and so I simply said, “oh, the fastest way” and so off we went towards the main highway through Dubai, racing across the six lanes and then back to the coast again, ending up costing as much as the Uber would have. The mall itself is small and organized like a traditional souk, but outside, there are magnificent waterways (with boat tours) and waterfront restaurants with views of the famous hotel through the grounds:

You can walk over quite a lot of these pathways, although the grounds of the hotel in the complex are private. I also discovered that although the Burj Al Arab is not very far from here, it is all private and there are no easy ways to walk to it, apart from along the main roads. So an Uber was needed to take me to the public Jumeirah beach to get the usual photos of the Burj from the beach. I had been here once before in 2009 and in those days, you could walk along the coast and on the beach by the hotel and I took this photo then:

I was expecting something similar this time, but what you can see now is this:

The owners of the original hotel have now built a brand new (opening late in 2023) 5 star hotel, yacht marina and luxury apartments on a new piece of land built out into the gulf. One of the reasons I went to Dubai was that I knew that many traditional views would have changed, and this was a prime example. I continued to walk further up the coast and got some idea of the land that is still available for building along this piece of coastline:

This is still the beach, but it did look more like a building site to me! All along the coast for what seemed like endless kilometers is a walking path, cycle path and a soft rubberized path for running without damaging your knees. It was pretty nice to walk on as well!

I did walk for several more miles first to the Night swimming beach which now has large floodlights to allow safe nighttime swimming, which I would imagine is fantastic in the heat of the summer.

And finally, I got to the Kite beach and this interesting sign for wheelchair beach users:

This was about as much as my feet could handle and so an Uber back to the hotel was the next plan!

After a short rest, I decided that I needed to walk to Bluewater Island which is just off the coast by the JBR beach and accessible by a walkway and bridge. I wanted to capture some unusual views of the Ain Dubai:

I took my fisheye lens with me for this excursion as I was sure I could never get far enough away from the Observation wheel to get it all in with a traditional lens. This was about as much as I could see with my regular lens, which I think still makes an interesting photo:

But standing on the same spot with the fisheye lens gave a very different perspective and the two security guards (who didn’t bother me) really add some scale to the size of the Observation Wheel:

Looking end on to the wheel gives a real feeling of the strength of those piers holding the wheel:

And finally, I decided to stand up against the front windows of the shopping mall on the island to get this view of both the building I was against, and the wheel:

And always looking for something different to illustrate a place, here is the Ain Dubai with the hotels and apartments of JBR beach in the distance:

With that, I strolled (slowly now) back to the mainland to complete my packing and get ready to leave for the airport. I decided to use the Metro for the trip, which actually worked very well. It cost perhaps $5 or so (I could have afforded the “first class” carriage if I had known how much was left on my travel card!) and took about an hour, but I had plenty of time with a 2am departure. Check in didn’t start until 10pm and then as this was a new United flight, the local staff printed my ticket upside down which meant the automated passport gates wouldn’t read it, but I was the only person standing in line to see the passport officer! And after a smooth (and long 14 hours) flight, I saw this view of New York City and the wastelands of Newark out of the aircraft window. Just a bit different to the views I had been used to in this adventure in Dubai!

I hope you have found this series of articles about Dubai to be interesting and useful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will do my best to answer them!