You’ve perhaps noticed by now that Dubai has become a regular stop in my travels.  There’s a work conference there every year that has proven to be quite beneficial for my research team, so I’ve attended it the last three years.  This year, in fact, we were due to go back in April for another event there, and in Saudi Arabia – and I had plans to also visit Kuwait and Oman.  As it turns out, the US government had other plans.  Hopefully the world will be settled enough to return next year; we’ll see.

The trip in February was to be a short one, and given my planned return in April, I debated not even taking my camera with me at all.  I had just gotten a new iPhone for work, and thought it’d be fun to see how far I could go with just the phone camera.  Given how much hassle I’d had shooting with a tripod in previous years, I certainly wasn’t taking that.  I ended up bringing the camera along in the end, but still shot with my iPhone quite a bit.  In fact, many of the images in this photo essay were shot with my iPhone, including the main image above – my favorite image of the trip!  I’ll leave it to you to figure out what other images were shot with it, but suffice it to say, I was quite impressed with it.

I don’t know if I caught the city on a good day, or what, but no one said a word to me about my camera this year.  In fact, I didn’t even notice the security guards around this year as in years past.  I’m guessing they were around still, just not nearly as visible this time around, for whatever reason.

Rather than dedicate multiple weeks to such a short trip, I thought I’d just do a photo essay this time around, which I hope you enjoy.

More next week!

–Dan Thompson