It's now Sunday, and I'm back in the UK for a week before heading back to Bulgaria. As always, Gulf Photo Plus was a lot of fun, not least because I got to meet up with some old friends from previous years, including: Bobbi Lane, Chris Hurtt, Robin Nichols, Joe McNally, Zack Arias, David Hobby, Mohamed Somji, and Hala Salhi. It was also a real pleasure to meet the new instructors at this year's event: Joey Lawrence, Vincent LaForet, Matt Kloskowski, Melissa Rodwell and Steve Simon.

If you're not familiar with the event, it's organised around a series of workshops. For example, Zack does a one-light workshop (amongst other things), I do a range of shooting and post-production sessions, Vincent did a week long session on using the 5D II to shoot video, and so on. There's also quite a lot of socialising, most notably at the Vista Bar on the roof of our hotel, and a range of other events, sessions, exhibitions, and so on.

One of the highlights of this year's event was a live shoot-out between Zack Arias, David Hobby and Joey Lawrence that took place during the closing ceremony. Each of them had 25 minutes to shoot and post-process a shot of two models, in front of an audience of several hundred photographers and students. David went first, and used about six "voice activated" light-stands (aka people with cameras and flash guns that were slaved to David's camera) to create a great, paparazzi style shot of the models. I don't think he's posted it online yet, but I'll link through when he does. Zack used three lights, and created an equally stunning shot. Joey, on the other hand, went for a slightly less sophisticated approach and shot a polaroid.

Update: David's take on the shoot-out is here:

http://strobist.blogspot.com/2010/03/speedlights-at-twenty-paces.html

Anyway, I'll tell you more about the event and everything else that went on later this week, but for now, here's another shot of the Jumeirah beach taken while I was out with Catalin Marin and Robin Nichols. The content is fairly similar to the previous one I posted, but I decided to process this one in a slightly different way. As always, let me know what you think.

Oh, and if you've been following my Facebook updates you'll know that ended up in the Emirates hospital on Friday evening, suffering from disturbingly painful stomach cramps. I'm still not quite sure what the problem was, but after taking a variety of tablets for a couple of days I now feel a whole lot better. At which point I should definitely thank Khaled for driving me to the hospital and Miriam for driving out there too to look after me.