Perspective is an important part of photography. 

Changing your position in relation to your subject, shooting from above, and getting down low are all ways you can tell a visual story in a different manner.

Another way to give an image perspective is by using selective focus.

Sometimes you want certain elements in the frame, because they give additional information but you don’t want those things to be the focus of the image.  Using a long lens and selective focus lets you show what is most important, while the out-of-focus elements add depth to the story, such as I’ve done in the image above. The story is about the Bluenose II ship, but the Mounties add a very strong visual impression that says that the image is Canadian.

Perspective has been a very important tool in my adjustment to life in Canada. When I first arrived back, nearly a year ago, I expected that the details and patterns of my life would sort themselves out very quickly.  Concepts such as quick or slow depend on your frame of reference, but looking back I didn’t anticipate how long this process of settling into Canada would take and have had to reassess my successes and failures more than once.

Simply finding a city that would embrace us took more than 6 months. It seemed like forever at the time, but in the frame of how long it took us to settle down once we moved to the Emirates, not really that long.

Work has been equally as challenging.

Landing a four month contract with the Rick Hansen Relay was a fantastic opportunity. Rick is a great guy to work for and the Relay had a really positive message that resonated with staff and participants alike.  Much of photo-journalism is wrapped up in stories of hardship, tragedy and exploitation, so spending four months documenting people expressing positive emotions was a real joy.

Unfortunately, most of the contacts I made during this time were in western Canada, and four months on the road did little to help me to settle down and feel grounded in one place.

Once I moved to Halifax, I made the rounds of the papers and agencies. Full-time work would be my preference, but the chances of getting hired to a full time position in a very tight news market when no one knows me from Adam? Not likely. So freelancing it has been.

Setting up as a freelancer has been hard work. If I had gone freelance in Dubai, it wouldn’t have been a problem.  I knew all the news and PR agencies and they knew me. Not so here. Picking up freelance assignments has been slow going. Oh, I’ve done a few jobs and signed on with a few agencies, but they have their regular shooters and they only call when no one else is available. Building a name and reputation for myself will take time.

Trying to stay positive given tough conditions is where perspective comes in.  Life since the crash in 2008 has been hard for a lot of people. And I am extremely grateful for the opportunities that I have had since coming home – working for the Relay, shooting the Bluenose re-launch, and a temporary day job in an office which isn’t glamorous but does bring in a weekly pay cheque, keeps me busy during the day and has allowed me to meet some people in my new city.

Some days I get down, and struggle to see the upside of things. But mostly I remind myself that things could be worse.

I try to focus on what I have accomplished rather than what I haven’t accomplished. Selective focus.

I am pathologically punctual. I hate being late.  I think habitual lateness is rude and ignorant.  It shows a lack of empathy and awareness that other people’s time is valuable.

Unfortunately, almost nothing happens on time in the Arabian Gulf.  Things get going eventually, but time is a loose concept and punctuality isn’t a particularly well-practiced skill. In seven years I was never able to adapt to their system of time-keeping.  If my photo assignment was for nine o’clock I’d be there 15 minutes early.

I tried to be late, but the best I could ever manage was being exactly on time. And then I’d sit there for ages waiting for things to get underway.

Rank and status play a large part in time keeping. The more important a person is, the later they will be.  Those with lower status wait for those with higher status.  I remember asking a PR woman when a particular event was going to start. I and the rest of the press corps had been waiting 45 minutes past when we were asked to be there.  ‘My dear, there is no start time. We start when the Sheikh gets here’. Well then.

Events would start on average 45 minutes late, but I have waited for up to 2 ½ hours. I wish I could count up the man hours lost in the Gulf because a Sheikh, VIP or Bollywood star couldn’t be bothered to get somewhere on time. I once waited 3 hours for Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty to show up at some hotel in Bur Dubai and she was only famous for being racially insulted on Britain’s Celebrity Big Brother reality TV show. 3 hours! Seriously. Get over yourself.

It would be a real treat when we dealt with American or British celebs/sports figures/politicians. I covered Tony Blair one day and his PR people went through his schedule minute by minute and then stuck to it.  Moments like this restored my faith in an organised universe.  

Only two Emiratis in the whole country were ever on time in my experience, so I have to give them a pat on the back.  Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al Maktoum, the head of Emirates Airlines, was strictly punctual for every public event he attended. He was late once to a press conference and apologised profusely for making us wait. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a Sheikh apologise for anything. The other punctual sheikh is Sheikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, the minister for higher education.  He could arrive 15 minutes early, which kept us all one our toes.

There are things I really miss about life in the UAE but the culture of lateness isn’t one of them.  Give me ‘Canadian’ time over ‘Arab’ time any day.

Dubai as a city is not overly pedestrian-friendly.

A fast highway runs through downtown with crossing points for walkers kilometres apart. There are so-called ‘crosswalks’ between traffic signals in residential areas, but I never once in seven years saw a driver stop at one when a pedestrian was waiting to cross.  

Pedestrians are the lowest form of life in Dubai and cyclists rate marginally
higher. Cars have the right of way, full stop. And the bigger your car, the more right your way is.

You take your life in your hands when you cross the street on foot. As a pedestrian you do not saunter across the road when a car is approaching. You run. Quickly. And hope the driver doesn’t put their foot any harder on the gas. Pedestrians  are killed regularly crossing busy roads in Dubai.

Canada is completely the opposite.  I can’t get over the absolute arrogance of pedestrians here. Not only do they not seem to think they are part of the movement of people around a city, but they act like they are superior beings. I wish I could describe the glares I’ve had from people crossing the street as I wait to turn left or right at a light. And then they walk even slower. I’m sorry Self-righteous Biped, I didn't realise one can attain a state of moral and human superiority simply by crossing the road.

I get that pedestrians have the right of way – when person and car collide it is obvious which will sustain the most damage. However, pedestrians are easily able to adjust their speed and turn with more agility than cars. You’re not a better person for walking instead of driving and you are a part of a society which is on the move. I don’t see why the pedestrian shouldn’t see themselves as part of traffic. There’s no need to make other people’s journey purposely longer because you don’t feel like walking any faster than a snail’s pace (and no, I’m not referring to people with mobility issues, but young, healthy people with attitudes).

And another thing - the amount of people who walk out into the street without looking to see what is coming is tragic. It’s almost anti-Darwinian. If you don't care enough about your own life to look where you're going…well you can imagine how that story ends.

I think a happy medium would be where it is safe to walk around the city but people are aware that everyone is trying to get somewhere and isn’t any more important because they are in a car or because they’re not in a car.

I have always felt there were many versions of me. Each person I know brings out a different side of my personality. I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with my husband when I not only realised that I loved him, but I loved the person I became when I was with him.

I feel like each place I have lived has transformed and redefined me. My experience in Korea was shaped by being on the outside looking in. There's no hiding being a foreigner in Korea. People stare and point. Young people say hello and then run away giggling. My body language changed. I bowed
all the time.

Dubai taught me how to open and close my eyes at the same time. I learned not to offer to shake hands with men, but holding hands with women was fine. Rules are often applied depending on who you are and which passport you hold, so I mostly lived knowing that rules didn't really apply to me, or at least knowing which ones did and which ones could be conveniently ignored.

One of the challenges of adapting to life back in Canada is figuring out how to be myself in the confines of the framework of Canadian society. It seems like I charged into Dubai like a bull. Things happened quickly. Being bold worked for me. Halifax is more of an easing. There’s no pushing your way into Atlantic Canada. It will let you in when it’s good and ready.

It is taking some time to shed my Dubai skin – the person I became there is still very much a part of me. You don’t let go of seven years in Arabia in a few months.

I'm much more conservative now. The Dubai-me sees young women and girls wearing next to nothing and thinks ‘put some clothes on’. I’m not saying women should walk around in burkas, but I don’t think overly sexualizing ourselves is any more liberating. Perhaps that's just me getting older.

I’m getting used to being able to touch my husband in public. Even hand-holding can be frowned on in Dubai, so kissing goodbye in public or walking with our arms around each other is something I am relearning and enjoying.

I’m also learning to look at people again. As a woman, walking through the streets of Dubai, there is a whole world of unwanted male attention waiting to be had. I learned that it was easier to avoid eye-contract than to deal with the stares and gestures. I looked down, pretending not to see.

In Dubai I was a photojournalist. I knew a lot of people. They knew me. Here, I’m a temp. I know very few people. No one knows who I am.

So here I am, 10 months into my move back to Canada, trying to figure out who I am again and how this place will leave it's stamp on me. I left Dubai because I needed my life to be different from what it was. Every day I feel like I'm getting a closer to that goal, but it is a slow process and I'm not a patient person.

Choosing a place to finally settle down in Canada has been an evolution.

Our original destination was Calgary. My sister and my delightful niece live there, and with the booming oil economy it seemed like a place that we would be able to relate to and start a life in.

I think two things sounded the death-knell for Calgary once we got there. The first was arriving in late November and the temperature dropping below -20C within the first week. The second was the lack of downtown vibrancy.  After living in Dubai I wanted to enjoy the perks of vibrant North American city living. I wanted nice places to walk and I wanted green space. I don’t want to live in the suburbs and I don’t want to spend all day in my car.

Calgary just wasn’t a good fit for us and that’s something we couldn’t really have known until we got there. So we took stock, decided to cut our losses and headed east to Toronto.

Looking back, those first couple of weeks in Toronto seem like a bad dream. We stayed at my Mom and Dad's house while looking for an apartment.  My parents are lovely, and generously opened their home to us and lent us their cars so that we could get organized. They fed us, encouraged us and were fantastic hosts. 

However, after living away from them for so long, I wasn’t used to their probing questions and unsolicited advice.  I know that’s what family does, but I’m not used to having to explain or justify my day-to-day actions to anyone, so I was defensive, testy  and on edge for most of the time we stayed there (sorry Mom).  When I’m feeling unsure about my whole life and questioning my place in the world I don’t want to have to explain why I did one thing and not another.

I think mostly I was just really, really stressed.  There were so many decisions to make and I haven’t had to make many decisions over the past few years.  My life was very ordered in Dubai and in some ways I was very sheltered. I lived in the same house for four years and paid one lump sum that covered rent, electricity, internet and house-cleaning.  I had been in the same job for more than five years and have been together with my husband for eight. My biggest decision on most days was what to cook for dinner and even then I couldn’t decide sometimes. I was completely out of practice.

And then I arrive in Canada and all of a sudden I am faced with a barrage of decisions to make and they are all pretty important ones. Which part of Canada, which city, downtown or suburbs, what size apartment? I mean, how do you know what your budget is when you don’t have a job?

We had all of our furniture that we shipped from the Middle East arriving and nowhere to put it and were about to sign a lease to spend money we weren’t yet earning.

I learned a very important life lesson in that period: sometimes you have no good choices. There is only making the best of a series of less-than-ideal options. So you try to pick the least bad choice and hope that you haven't buggered up your life completely.

Starting over is hard.  Having done it a few times in my 37 years, it seems to get more difficult each time I go through it.

I’m hoping this time will be the last time. That’s the plan anyhow.

I left the United Arab Emirates in late 2011. I had been in Dubai for nearly 7 years. I started there with a job teaching kindergarten in Abu Dhabi and was very lucky to transition to a job as a photographer for a few small magazines. This in turn led me to getting hired at one of the English daily papers, where I spent 5 years on staff.  Most of what I did was photography, though I was lucky to have some fantastically open-minded senior editors who let me write and become a photo editor as well.

Life in the Emirates was interesting.  You learn to see the world very differently when you move outside of the culture you were raised in. Many of my assumptions about how the world works and how human beings function in society were proved to be completely wrong. People are not the same all over the world. They are very, very different.

Nonetheless, I settled in. I learned how to get around Dubai, made a wide-ish circle of friends and colleagues, and did my best to cope with a way of living that prioritizes very different norms and values than the ones I was raised with. 

Before I knew it years had passed. And though there were distinct advantages to life as an expat in the UAE I was feeling it was time to go. I could go through a long list of positives and negatives to my life in Dubai, but the simplest way to explain my need to leave was that my life there was not what I wanted it to be long term.

Unfortunately, simply picking up and returning to Canada wasn’t as easy as you might expect.

In my years overseas I had met and married a wonderful Irishman. So it was not just one person’s life that needed sorting out but a pair of lives. I suppose we could have simply moved to Canada and dealt with all of his immigration papers once we were in the country. This didn’t seem like a good idea to us. It made more sense to get his residency approved first, that way he would have the right to work immediately, rather than waiting potentially years for his papers to be processed.

It took us 3 months to collect all the paperwork that they asked (including a list of every country he had visited for the past 10 years including exact dates, I mean who records that kind of stuff? There are no passport stamps within the EU and Europeans move around a lot.). Then we had 9 months of waiting to hear if he had been approved.

When they finally did give him his residency we had just 60 days to wrap up our lives in the Emirates and then had to arrive in Canada within 4 months. If we had gone over the allotted time leaving or arriving we were told that they could revoke his residency.  So there was no time to plan or find jobs in Canada before we left. We just had to get up and go. Most people don’t even move cities unless they have a job to go to. We were moving halfway around the world.