Alessio Michelini Photography

Today Adobe announced the new Adobe CC, which it stands for Creative Cloud, and it comes with new tools in Photoshop, some are the same shown in the beta of LightRoom 5, but today I don't want to talk about the new cool features, but about the uncool prices.
It's nothing new, the Creative Cloud is out from a year now, but I was kinda hoping that they review their prices, especially here, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.
I have to say that Adobe is really good to make softwares, but terrible with math. Now, in a normal market, if you buy one good, you get a price, but if you buy 10 goods, generally you get a discout, this is nothing new, I feel a bit stupid to talk about this very simple economic matter.
But Adobe� archived something that would make Apple a honest company compared to them. Remember that this is a software you download from the internet, it's not a physical good that you have to deliver and there is no extra taxation.
Now, lets do some math: in the US the Creative Cloud costs $49.99, and if you go to xe.com and translate this price to euro, the result is about €38.08 in the moment I'm writing. I can understand that this is not a fixed ratio and I'm not saying that Adobe should change prices every two minutes in countries outside the US, but I could say that maybe a price of €44.99 is a decent price that would be reasonable for both parts, clients and Adobe, No? Unfortunately if you live in Europe, if you want to have the same exact product, you will have to pay €61.49 a month, which is an extra 62% from the american price, not a 5% or 10% extra but a pretty huge 62%.
Someone said to me that we live in a free market economy and Adobe can do whatever they want with their price. That's true, but this doesn't mean that we (european) cannot complain about it, and a big company, like Adobe, should knows that the last thing they want is to screw clients from a market which is twice as big as the american one.
I know that Adobe is in a dominant position, Photoshop is the standard in photography, and there is nothing like Photoshop out there, or at least nothing as good as Photoshop, but dear Adobe, bear in mind that things can change, and if someone will come out with a product that is good as yours, but with better prices, it's just a matter of time that you dominance will fall apart.
And while we can still say that, for now, Photoshop cannot be replaced by anyone, can we say the same about other products? As a web developer I see that Flash is slowly fading out, AS3 has been released back in 2006, and I don't really see that Adobe is doing anything new on that front, Dreamweaver has a billion of competitors and it's hated by most of the web developers, and all the other softwares, Premiere, AfterEffects, and others can be easily replaced as well.
So Adobe, do you really want to screw your clients? It's a game that can work for a while, but on long therm it might be a bad, bad idea.
Don't do the same errors that Microsoft did in the past few years with their awful windows Vista, 7 and 8, which only gained new clients for Apple.

Finally, after months of hesitation and after a billion of reviews and different opinions, I got  my brand new Canon 6D, my very first Full Frame camera, and despite my many doubt, about the body, viewfinder, SD cards, etc... I have to say that I'm really happy with this camera just after a few test shots. I'll probably going to do a proper review in the next weeks, especially with my other recent purchase, the Canon 17-40mm f/4 L USM, and I really want to see how is going to behave with that body.
Anyway, here there are a few test shots, nothing special, just random shots, but I've already noticed how good are the High ISO performances. The noise is really well controlled, there no banding at all, and in general the noise is really pleasant.
50mm - f/2.2 - 1/125 sec - ISO 6400

Now, before you start to read this post, please play the video above until it's not stuck in your head. This video it was used in the 60s and 70s by italian public television RAI, as an interval in case there were problems with the transmission or in case a naked woman entered the studio in the wrong moment. So please listen this song a few times and then read the rest.
Done? Good. Now you can read the rest of the post.

As you know, I revived my RedBubble account, and today, while I'm preparing for tonite, as I've been selected as one of the "official" photographers for this weekend music festival in Dublin, the Camden Crawl Dublin, I spent a hour adding new photos on it, still plenty of them are missing, but it takes a while to find all the good snaps in my pretty huge archive (2.5 TB of photos), and upload them on RedBubble.
Anyway, these are some of the prints you can find now on my little shop.

Buy it on RedBubble

While I'm working on tonite's pictures of the artist Passenger, I wanted to publish these two random photos I took while I was going to Vicar St. Sometimes it's amazing how a picture, took in a fraction of a second, without thinking that much, and with a bit of post processing, can turn into something really interesting, or at least for me (and my girlfriend).
What do you think about these two photos? Are they good or are they completely shite?

In my future plans I have the redesign of my website, apart obviously the blog (a refresh after two months it would be pretty silly), but as I do websites for living, working on my personal website on my spare time is not that easy, it tooks two years before I got rid of the previous 5-minutes-made wordpress site, so it might take a while before the new website is done. But one of the feature I will add on the next site it will probably be a shop.
As probably some of you already know, it's really difficult to make a living with photography, and a good chunck of my savings goes on cameras, lenses, flashes, etc..., so if I can earn some money with what is my passion, to buy better gear, it would be really nice.
So what I decided is to revive my old RedBubble account, which I probably didn't use for at least a couple of years, and I started to upload some of the pictures I have on my current website, and I've linked these photos to the current website, and if you watch my website you can find a new little icon, with the quite obvious word "buy", that links back to the related photos on the RedBubble site.

So, if you want to help me and get a nice print of one (or more) of my pictures, you can buy them from RedBubble. At the moment there are just a few of them, but I'll keep uploading photos in the next few days. Bear in mind that you will be able to buy all the photos, apart the music ones. In case you want a print of those ones, please contact me privately using the contact form you can find on the menu on the top.
Thanks!

Here we are, yesterday, thank to the decent weather, I went around the Aviva Stadium to take some test shots to see how my new wide lens behaves, nothing too artistic, just a few photos ot things. But on the way home I have to wait for the train to pass, so I took a snap, on the tripod but without any ND filters.

To be fair is an alright shot, for me it's a 2 out of 5 stars on lightroom, which is the minimum to be published for me, but still, it's the first good picture made with my brand new lens :-)
Expect and lens review in the next few days!

This is the story of Gemma Atkinson and her fight against the police who tends to use too much their power despite human civil rights. Just watch it, any additional words are just useless.

(via PetaPixel)

Lets start from the very beginning. In the last three years I've been taking portraits of irish artists who have been nominated for one of the main music awards in Ireland, the (now Meteor) Choice Music Prize. How I managed to do that? Simple: the company where I work does the interviews that every year are shown on the big screen at the night of the event.
It become a sort of tradition, and even if the budget is not huge, it's always fun (and stressy) to do it. So what I've done for the last 3 years, was to take a few pictures of each of the artists before or after they got interview. It sounds easy, it is not.
First problem we have every year, is time. We always try to shoot all the interview in a couple of days, which is not the easiest thing in the world, especially when you have to deal with artists, so you end up to have 5/6 artists in a day, and you hope that everything goes fine. But if you take out the time to� shoot the interview, and add the very little patience of some artists, at the end the time I have to shoot is more or less 5 minutes. 10 when I'm lucky.
Then most of the times we know which is the venue at the very last minute, or if we know in advance I don't have the time to scout the place, which is fondamental, so some of the shoots are a total disaster for me, as I have to test with the artist in place and I have to hope that everything goes fine.
For that reason I'm going to write about some of these portraits I took in the past, trying to explain how I did it despite my inability to explain things and my pretty poor english.

Anyway, let's start with the first artist, which is Damien Dempsey.

Last friday I've ordered my new wide zoom lens, a brand new Canon 17-40mm L USM, from Amazon.co.uk, and today after only 3 working days it's arrived and I already put in my backpack. I ordered on Amazon 'cause I kinda trust that site, they had the best price and I know that I could claim the Canon Spring Cashback, as indicated on the Canon site, which it supposed to give me back 100 euro from my purchase. I said "supposed", as I just got an email from Canon saying that, they regret, but they cannot approve my claim as I bought the lens from a third party.
Yes, when you buy a good on Amazon, most of the times you are not buying a good from Amazon, but from an affiliate of Amazon, the little name you see under the stock quantity. Most of you probably never noticed, but you better start to do it.
Apparently, Canon say that you can claim the cashback only if you by a Canon product sold directly by Amazon. Obviusly they don't state this clearly on the canon site but you supposed to read the less read document on the internet called "Terms & Conditions".
Oooh Canon, thank you very much to tell me that only after my purchase, thank you very much. But lets state a couple of points:

• If you buy the lens in a actual shop, the price is is essentially the online price + the cashback, so what's the advantage of the cashback? To pay a good for the same price you can find it online?
• Amazon.co.uk doesn't sell directly the lens above, you have to buy from a third party (and I've been checking the price for weeks), so Canon is saying that you can claim the cashback from an item that essentially cannot be bought.

So, after these two points, it's clear that the Canon Cashback is clearly a fraud, made only to tempt its costumers to buy one of their products, letting them believe that it's a "good deal" when is definitely not.

Dear Canon, I've been your costumer for years, my next step was to buy a new DSLR, a Canon 6D or a Canon 5D Mk III, thinking to do a good deal by buying in the next month using the cashback, but now I just feel fooled from a brand I used to love.
So, I'll probably buy a new camera, as I don't have any alternative unless I switch to Nikon, which I think is a pretty stupid move for me, but next lens? Sigma or Tamron, as they are both making some great lenses with reasonable prices, and they probably treat their costumers better than you do, dear Canon.

Best Regards