If you skated Dubai before 2012, you know. If you didn't, let us tell you about Sparks.
The spot
Sparks was built around 2006, a stone's throw from Deira Fountain. It had everything: straight ledges, curved ledges, short and long ones, a 10 stair, a kicker gap, manny pads and possibly the best flat ground this city has ever had. All of it wrapped in marble and granite in shades of maroon.
The name came from the sparks that flew when someone landed primo. That's the kind of place it was.
Why it mattered
Sparks gave us shade, smooth ground and a safe place to skate in the middle of the city, right where people walked past. Locals were there all the time and visiting pros made it a regular stop.
It was more than a spot. It was a hub of creativity, community and camaraderie, and a big part of how the local scene progressed.
The end
Around 2012, Sparks was destroyed. Shoes were chunky, karak was still 50 fils, and The Carter II was on repeat. For those of us who skated it, it still holds a special place.
Keeping it alive
In 2023 we turned Sparks into a Habibi board graphic, so the spot could live on, even if only as a wall hang. It only happened because of Greg Charbain. He shot the spot from above on film, in two frames. Neither one shows the whole thing. Without those two photos there was no graphic.
Greg's two original frames.
Why stitching them was so hard
Stitching took more than a week of manual warping and fidgeting in Photoshop. It's the kind of job that makes you go brain dead. Here's why:
- Fisheye bends everything. Straight ledges and buildings come out curved, and the curve gets stronger toward the edge of the frame. Every part of each photo had to be unbent before anything could line up.
- Two frames, two angles. Shot by hand, the camera shifts slightly between frames. Things close to the lens and things far away move by different amounts, so fixing the ground throws the buildings off, and the other way round. No single warp fixes it. It's done patch by patch.
- No lens data. These are film scans. Stitching software normally reads the lens info to undo the distortion automatically. With film, there's nothing to read, so it's all by eye.
- People move. Each frame is a different moment. Skaters and passers-by shift between shots, so they double up or get cut in half where the frames meet.
- Then it has to fit a board. The stitched image is long and curved. A deck is narrow, with rounded noses and truck holes, so it gets cropped and warped again.
And after all that, there's a mistake. A transparency error on one of the layers left some of the light pillars doubled, like a ghost. Eagle eyes will spot it. Got the board? Go look.
We made a video for the board too.
Got photos or clips from Sparks? Send them over. We're always adding to The Habibis, our archive of UAE skate history.
Photos by Evan Collisson (@ebansan), except the light trails shot and the overhead photos by Greg Charbain (@gregjojo). Video by Maysam Faraj. Thank you both for keeping the archive.
