There are moments when an industry doesn’t slows down (usually, against our will). Dubai seems to be having one of those moments. The launches stopped. The activations disappeared. The marketing budgets were quietly cut down. Downtown, in the middle of the day, looked less like a global capital of ambition and more like a film set waiting for extras who never arrived.

Which, somehow, made it the perfect time to talk about photo and video production. Meet Sergey Ulanov, the founder of MuArt Creative Studio.

Ulanov is a photographer from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, who came to Dubai from wedding photography and fairly quickly realised that weddings alone weren’t going to take him very far here. Dubai, as he sees it, works differently: the real opportunities sit in corporate work, brand projects, private events and high-net-worth clients. So, like many people who last in this city, he adapted. Over time, weddings became almost irrelevant to his work, and his focus shifted towards production, commercial projects and working more directly with brands.

He now runs MuArt Creative Studio, a full-cycle team working across photography, video, events and branded content for clients ranging from hotels and developers to agencies and brands. In practice, that means everything from smaller, intimate shoots to large-scale productions — and, more importantly, a front-row view of what happens when a market built on visibility suddenly goes quiet.

We spoke about the strange economics of Dubai production, the collapse of the middle market, the people leaving, the people staying, the fantasy of the V-shaped rebound, and why AI has become both a genuinely useful tool and a source of low-level professional panic.

— Let’s start with the obvious. What is happening to our lovely industry? There are no events, all the big launches, marketing campaigns and activations have been postponed, and there is this general lull. How does that feel in the world of photo and video production?

— First of all, the market in Dubai is split in a very particular way. There is the very expensive, high-level segment, and then there is the very cheap one. The middle barely exists. If we are talking about the high-end segment, it has been hit very hard. People started cancelling or postponing events, brands started saving money, and nobody really understood what was coming next. From conversations with other photographers and videographers, it felt like around 98 per cent of people had lost work. For some, it went completely dry. For others, it was maybe one very simple shoot a week.

— So who is still working?

— Mostly the people charging less. And “cheap” in Dubai comes with its own scale. Anything above 1,000 dirhams an hour is already considered good. That is exactly the segment that suffered the most.

— Right, because as far as I know, any decent fashion event usually starts at around 1,500 to 2,000 dirhams an hour.

— Exactly. That segment got hit hard because brands and companies stopped doing events altogether for a while. Meanwhile, the people charging 500 to 600 dirhams an hour were doing all right. Not brilliantly, but all right.

— Which tracks. We work with a lot of contractors, and there is always that jump: either you hire someone for 500 or 600, where the quality isn’t necessarily bad but definitely debatable, or you leap straight to 1,500. There doesn’t seem to be much in between.

— That is exactly it. And what was especially striking was what was happening in all the industry chats. Every day there were people selling equipment, renting out flats, selling cars. It felt like a mass exodus. In a way, Dubai was cleansing itself.

That wasn’t exactly an uplifting phrase, but it wasn’t an inaccurate one either. Across the media, the mood was remarkably similar. Production budgets, editorial budgets, campaign budgets: all of them, at some point or another, lead back to marketing. And whenever there is a crisis, marketing is usually first to the guillotine.

— It feels like the same thing in the media, to be honest. Shoots are funded through marketing budgets, editorial projects are funded through marketing budgets, and historically the moment a crisis appears, marketing is the first thing to be cut. Sometimes that feels short-sighted. In this case, it felt almost logical. Residents had left, tourists weren’t coming, and even the people still in Dubai were mostly indoors. You could sit downtown in the middle of a workday and see no cars, no people, no life. Why spend money attracting an audience that isn’t there?

— Yes, exactly. But what is interesting is that when I say the market is cleansing itself, it is mainly happening in the segment that doesn’t really interest me anyway. There was a lot of talk about how, once all of this ended, everything would recover and there would be this V-shaped rebound. But in reality, the people already working in the high-level segment weren’t leaving. They were staying put and waiting. They could afford to do that because they had built some financial cushion, and probably because they understood the market better. So there was this feeling that when things restarted, it would be the below-market segment that disappeared, while the people already established at the top wouldn’t need to change much.

That seemed to be the grim comfort of the whole situation: the top end was suffering, yes, but it wasn’t necessarily dying. It was waiting. Very elegantly, presumably. Possibly while pretending not to panic.

— What I do agree with is that there will probably be a boom. But first the season is basically over, is it nott? Formally, we should still have been making good money in April, perhaps even May. But with airlines still not flying and everything moving slowly, even if the whole situation resolved itself tomorrow, the world wouldn’t reopen overnight. Realistically, the season probably doesn’t begin again until mid-September.

— Yes, I think that is right. But when it does restart, there probably will be a boom, because after six months of silence everyone will need to remind the market they exist. Restaurants, hotels, long-established brands, new brands, they will all suddenly be in the same position. Everyone will have to say: we are here, we are open, we are worth noticing.

— Which is probably the upside. If the people who were only ever willing to pay 500 or 600 dirhams had just carried on as usual, nothing would have changed. But after a crisis like this, when the rebound comes, everyone will need promotion again. And by then the labour market in Dubai may have been seriously thinned out.

— Exactly.

— Although unfortunately it isn’t only weak contractors who may not survive. Small brands, small venues, small independent businesses might disappear too. And not just in production or media. For independent media, surviving six months of the low season is also extremely hard.

— That is true. Even some big names were affected. There were stories everywhere: venues cutting most of their staff, places closing, restaurants shutting down even when you would think they could afford to stay open.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the question every expat market crisis eventually produces: do you stay, or do you begin aggressively listing your belongings online under the heading urgent sale?

— So what is the better strategy? Sell your gear, sell your car, leave, and hope to make a comeback in the autumn? Or stay put and say: I am here, I stayed, I am loyal to this market?

— For me, the instinct was to stay. I would cut whatever expenses I could and try to hold out longer. A lot of people lost faith in Dubai because they believed it was the ultimate safe place, and then suddenly that faith cracked. A lot of people started leaving. But for some reason I still believed in it. At the same time, of course, I was building backup plans and alternatives. Still, my personal plan was to stay, wait, and believe that sooner or later there would be that V-shaped rebound. Everything might keep falling for a while, but when it swings back, it could swing back hard. Most likely in the autumn, if the situation resolves by then.

— So it isn’t really about waiting passively.

— No, not at all. It is about getting ready. I was working on relationships with PR agencies, marketing agencies, and trying to build a stronger position so that when the market returned, I would be ready for it.

That practical instinct, the refusal to simply sit still, is also what led the conversation towards AI. Which, depending on the day, is either the future of creative work or an especially smug way to make everyone nervous.

— I know you have started paying much more attention to AI and alternative ways of working with photo and video production. In some cases, AI already makes it possible to skip the shoot and still get a result, perhaps even a better one. Am I being unfair to photographers?

— Not really. I actually ran an experiment. I sent a series of AI-generated images to a group of photographers. Out of thirteen people, twelve said it was a great series. Only one immediately recognised it as AI. And even when I asked more deeply which images they liked and why, most people didn’t realise what they were looking at.

— And how did the one person who figured it out know?

— Honestly, I didn’t analyse it. They just said: this is AI. But that person already knew I was deeply into AI, so that may have influenced things. Still, the point isn’t only that AI can generate convincing images. The bigger point is that AI has become useful in business and workflow. A lot of people say they are implementing AI, but when you ask for an actual use case, they can’t really answer. They are exploring, clicking around, seeing cool things. That isn’t the same as building a process around it.

— So what does a real process look like?

— One example is using AI agents as assistant-employees. One can research the restaurant industry and build a spreadsheet of leads with emails, phone numbers and contact details. Another can take that spreadsheet, upload it to a server, pick a restaurant at random, analyse its website and visual style, then generate a PDF presentation using my existing photography, match it to the brand’s colours and mood, write the email, and save the whole thing as a ready-to-send draft. At that point, all I have to do is review it and press send.

This, clearly, is what separates “interested in AI” from “quietly building oneself an army”.

— I have no doubt that AI is phenomenal for operations. But the more complicated and honestly more interesting question is AI in content creation, because that is where the real debate starts. Is something created with AI still art? If someone thinks strong photography and video are an art form, there is an understandable resistance. There is this feeling that a prompt can’t be art, that it is some kind of shortcut. A trick. A cheat.

— I understand that. But using AI well still requires skill. Over time, you start to understand what each tool is good for. You can’t just open one programme and expect something client-ready to appear. Some tools are fine for experiments or playful content, but not for professional use. Others are stronger. And even then, using them properly takes time, training and a lot of trial and error.

— That is true in editorial work too. AI can be incredibly useful for generating visuals for articles, especially if you are producing a huge amount of content every month. Working with real illustrators for everything would be ideal in theory, but in practice it is too slow and too expensive.

— Exactly. That is where AI shines most clearly: speed. Time is the most expensive thing right now. If a process takes too long, my instinct isn’t to accept it. It is to ask how it can be solved differently.

— Let’s try to model a situation. What kind of brand need could genuinely be solved with AI? Where would you say: let’s not do a full shoot here, with set design, location, models, stylist, all of it, and instead let us do this with AI?

— You have to be careful there. From a business point of view, of course I could try to sell as much AI-based work as possible. For example, I could shoot a boutique cleanly, then use AI to generate a video or photos around that real space, even some kind of fashion shoot. It could all look polished and expensive, and yes, some people would probably notice the difference, but the broader audience probably wouldn’t.

— But as a photographer? That must feel slightly criminal.

— As a photographer, I still want to shoot things myself. What I would probably want from AI is something else. Sometimes you show up to a job, and even if you are a great professional, even if you know exactly what you are meant to capture, wide shots, atmosphere, details, people, things still go wrong. You miss something, or you don’t shoot enough. In that sense, AI can help a lot. It can help you create a shot that simply doesn’t exist.

— There is an ethical line there. Let’s say I was at a fashion event, and the photographer didn’t shoot me. Then the brand says: how could that happen, we need a photo of the founder of The Sandy Times. I would absolutely not want to be generated with AI and dropped into the folder afterwards.

— Yes, and I think that is fair. I am talking less about people and more about details, atmosphere, things like that. With people, I understand it. I would react the same way.

— It does feel as though AI might be very good for food shoots, though.

— Maybe. But the challenge is that restaurants also want authenticity. They don’t just want a beautiful image of food. They want their dish, their space, their atmosphere, the little details that make the place real. So AI opens incredible possibilities, but it is still not always obvious how to apply it well.

— Which probably explains why it also irritates people so much. I consume a lot of wellness content, and the moment I realised I could no longer tell whether I was looking at a real person showing a real transformation or an AI-generated model, my trust collapsed.

— Yes, and that is why I think the right attitude for now is this: it is definitely worth learning and getting better at, and then time will show where it can really be applied. When you work a lot in one field and constantly study AI, you develop an instinct for what is actually useful, where a feature is strong, where it can patch something, where it can genuinely help the workflow.

— And I think it is important to say that AI is especially strong in operational work. Creative work includes a surprising amount of operational work too.

— Right now, for us, one of the strongest real-world applications is post-production. AI still doesn’t replace human judgement in colour correction and light correction, but once a human has done that stage, AI can take over the batch retouching. It can preserve texture, remove shine, even out skin tone, reduce redness, fix minor fabric issues, and do that across a hundred photos in about an hour.

— But it is important to be honest here too: that doesn’t mean anyone can pick up the tool and get a perfect result immediately.

— Exactly. It still needs training.

— Which is why I keep saying AI has basically replaced interns. Years ago, interns were brought in to learn on the job, usually unpaid, and you would spend three to six months teaching them without knowing whether they would become useful. Now, in a way, AI is the intern. You teach it your taste, your style, your workflow, your business, and eventually it starts producing genuinely useful ideas and outcomes.

— That is actually a very good comparison. It is, unfortunately, also a devastating one.

— And that is probably why the negativity around AI won’t last forever. Like any new technology, it is meeting resistance now, but over time that resistance will soften, especially as people begin using it in more practical and less gimmicky ways.

— I agree. And the bigger picture may be even more radical than that. The people who are truly deep in this space, especially very strong programmers, are convinced that in a year and a half or two, we won’t recognise the world. They think people will be able to open a Telegram bot, type a request for a product tailored exactly to their needs, and have it built almost instantly.

— That is exactly the kind of thing I am waiting for in everyday life too: a genuinely intelligent home assistant, the kind we were all promised by science fiction years ago. Something you can ask to log your cycling workout, switch on the coffee machine, tell you the weather, without requiring seventeen apps, three hubs and a nervous breakdown.

— Yes, but that version of the future feels very close now. Which, by this point, seemed either thrilling or mildly alarming, depending on one’s attachment to reality and employment.

— Before we finish, what is your message for those who experience the same challenges as you these days?

— Stay visible, stay flexible, learn quickly, and be ready. Because when the market comes back, it probably won’t come back politely.