As an architectural interior photographer in Dubai, I was recently assigned to shoot the infinity pool at the newly opened Taj hotel in Jumeirah Lakes Towers in Dubai.

The purpose of this post is to show you the reader the before and after of the shot. I shot this 8 second exposure using an ND 13 filter. This allowed me to smooth out the water in daylight.

The above is the 8 second base image on which I built on. I started out by fixing the shadows and the overcooked highlights in the sky. Once that was done the crane had to go along with cameras and smoke detectors. They are just distractions and do not contribute to the image. Reflections of people in the shadow area (visible when you zoom in) were removed.

Now that leaves me with a good enough image already. But it was lacking something. Something moody. Something that makes you want to take a dip in this pool. The sky needed a replacement. I looked up long exposure movement of clouds since the water was smoothed out using long exposure.

That image is 95% done. One of the requests from the client was to have a Taj logo more revealing. That was possible if I stepped to the left. But that would mean changing my composition, perspective and cropping of the sun beds on the right. And I did exactly just that but did not use that image entirely. I used a part of it. With a little time spent in post, I matched the logo superimposed it on this image.