Alessio Michelini Photography

After months that I’ve been trying to write a post about my trip to Iceland I’ve done in August (yes, August, six months ago), I’ve to declare my defeat: I can’t do it. Two intense weeks of travels, where we drove 3980km in one of the most outstanding place I’ve ever been in my life it’s not easy. I tried a couple of times, and actually some parts of this article come from my previous attempts, but this time I’m not going to even try to write those two weeks in one post. It’s clearly impossible, well, maybe not impossible, but I might end up with a huge post that probably most of you will stop reading far before reaching the end of it.
So, that’s the plan: this post it’s going to be a sort of travel guide, giving you an overview of the trip I’ve done, the odd things I’ve encountered in Iceland, things to do and to not to do, and how to be prepared if you want to go to visit this incredible country.
Now, let’s get started.

I've been working on this personal photography project from a while now, about 5 months now, and in this time I always brought my trusty mirrorless camera with me, and I've photographed to the people who, like me, commute everyday to work/college/pub/anythingelse and back with the train/luas/buses in Dublin.
At the moment I'm writing I've already took almost 200 pictures, which can be viewed on this set on my flickr account, which show a silent population made of people who mostly travel back and forth to the same place, every workday, people that spend most of their trip tapping on a phone, socializing with their "friends" on Facebook or Twitter, while they isolate themselves from the people around them. It's a slice of modern life at the end, even if it's a bit sad on my opinion.
As I said, I shot this project entirely with the Fuji X-E1, a camera that it's perfect for this job as people don't get scared by the size of it as it would happen if I go around with a big DSLR with big lenses, and actually they think is an old film camera, and this with the fact that I always look like a tourist, it helps me a lot. Also a good 95% where all made with couple of vintage manual lenses, while the rest have been done with the new Samyang 12mm f/2 NCS CS I bought a couple of months ago. While manual focusing on a train full of people it's not exactly the easiest thing in the world, once I got the grip on it, it becomes natural, and as I said before, it slows you down, and it gives you more time to think and to compose the shot. It forces you to do what a photographer should do before taking any shot, to observe the world around you.

Anyway, down here you can find some of the best shot I've done for this project so far, I hope you like them and as usual if you have any comments/critiques/whatever, please leave a message in the disqus box at the end of the page!
Thanks

A month ago I posted an article regarding my impression of the Fujifilm X-T1 as a viable camera for music photographers, so some of you are probably going to think “why he’s doing a second review on the same camera?”. Well, since I got that camera in my hands, I had two questions in my mind. The first one was to know if that camera could  potentially replace my DSLR for live music photography, and the second was to see how this camera is good for general shooting, so that’s why I want to make two articles, because the first one was specifically driven by the first question, if that was a good camera for music photographers, a very specific field of use, while this article I’m going to show if this camera is a good camera for the average Joe.

A couple of months I had to shoot the live show of Corner Boy for Red Bulletin Magazine, and because I could shot the entire show, I tried to bring my Fuji X-E1 alongside with my trusty Canon 6D, just to see how it behaves in such light conditions. While the AF was struggling sometimes and the white balance in some shots was completely off, a good amount of shots were pretty usable, even despite the kit lens, which is an excellent general purpose lens, but for not so much for gigs, or at least not for my standards, as I mostly shoot with only very fast prime lenses, no zoom lenses, and the slowest is the Canon EF 135mm f/2L USM. But despite a slow lens, and a camera not made for that type of photography it was pretty decent, still not usable for me, especially when you have only 3 songs, and that’s the 99.9% of gigs, and with a slow buffer and not that good AF it would make pretty impossible to use for a live show.