Alessio Michelini Photography

As I previously said, one week ago me and Riccardo, a good friend of mine and a good photographer as well, went to Bull Island, a famous place for kite surfers in Dublin, but apparently kinda unknown for everyone else, and apart the test shots, I took some random shots, nothing really special, but still decent shots, and the two black and white landscapes are the last two shots from my beloved and now gone Sigma 10-20mm. I still can't believe I sold that lens.

I don't like to sell gear, I don't like to buy used gear as well, maybe it's because it's the italian 80s mentality to buy everything new if you can, I know it's wrong, but unfortunately this bug is in my head and it's not easy to get rid of it.
So, as I'm planning to move to a Full Frame body in the next month(s), which is obviously going to be my main body, and my current main body, which is a Canon 7D, it will be used only for some gigs and maybe video, but definetely not for landscapes, the only EF-S lens I currently have (apart the Sigma 17-70 which I land to a friend of mine and the last time I used was probably 3 years ago, and I'm not really interested in using it anymore) is my beloved Sigma 10-20mm EX DC HSM.

The Beauty in photography can be defined by some rules, like the composition, or if it's well exposed, colors, etc... many different factors that, all togheter, can define if the photo you are looking at is a good or a bad one. But there is always a threshold that changes with your personal test. A picture that can be defined, using the above factors, good or not, can be amazing for someone or awful to someone else. I'm not saying anything new, as we say in Italy, I discovered the hot water.
But even if it's a very simple matter, there are events that makes you think about this simple, obvious, matter.
For example, look this photo:

One thing I really love, especially on the weekends, is to take the DART, and get off wherever I see something it might be interesting to photograph. Sometimes is that simple, you take the train, stop somewhere, take some pictures, and go back home. But after 5 years, I can say that I've been almost everywhere in the Dublin bay, so here a common but sometimes very underestimated tool enters in the game: Google Maps.
And sometimes with Google Maps you can discover hidden places, or at least not very well known, which you were totally unaware of their existance, and last week I was looking the nice but well known Dalkey, about 15km (I think) south of Dublin, and I was trying to find any interesting cliffs to photograph with my brand new ND filter, when I noticed a tiny place with a very fancy name: Hawk Cliff.

Here we are, with the last day of our trip to Donegal, and Northern Ireland at the end, as we decided to drive a few extra kilometers and stop at the Giant's Causaway, probably the most famous natural attraction in Northern Ireland. I've been there before, but it was very late (never travel with 3 women, never) and it was pissing rain. This time was the opposite, apart from the wind which it seems to be quite constant in this place, so almost sunny, and with plenty of time, plus it was a good test for my brand new ND filter, the Lee Big Stopper (but I'll do a proper review about this yoke in the next weeks). The only real problem of this place is that it become too famous, while a few years ago there were almost nothing apart a small office, now there is an insane (shopping) center, which they will going to ask you a fortune to see (34 pounds for the four of us and the car), and obviously because it was easter, and as I already said it's a quite famous place, it was crowded from tourists (like us), especially some silly japanese which they don't really get the fact that you can't walk with high heels on these rocks.

Adobe just released the public beta for the next version of Photoshop Lightroom 5, which will bring plenty of new features:

Advanced Healing Brush

Radial Filter

Upright

The beta program will run through June 30th, and you can download from here.

Bear in mind that this is a beta version, so it's still far away from a finished product, and do not uset it in production environment!

(via MacRumors via Photoshop.com Blog)

I've never been too much attracted by mirrorless cameras, most of them are ok but I personally think they are still too far away from the quality I can get with a proper DSLR, or even just the simplicity of control the camera settings, as I'm always shot in manual mode, so I constantly play with aperture, shutter speed and ISO, and I don't really want to get lost in some silly menus like most of the mirrorless. Ok this video shows up the differences between two of the most popular mirrorless you can find on the market, but what it actually stands out on this video is the image quality of the Fuji X-E1, especially on the dynamic range and high ISO performance. Personally that's the only mirrorless camera I would actually buy, maybe even because I always loved their cameras as my very first prosumer camera was a Fuji S7000, which nowadays it looks way outdated but back in the mid 2000 was an amazing little camera. Anyway, if you are thinking to buy a mirrorless and you are undecided between the Sony NEX-6 or the Fuji X-E1, you should see this video made by Chris Niccolls of The Camera Store.

(via The Camera Store)

Last night I was watching a video about a feature of Photoshop CS6, and the guy on the video kept pronouncing the word Bokeh as "Bo Kay", and he was really getting on my nerves. How you can do a tutorial about Bokeh without knowing how to feckin pronounce that word???
Anyway, in this post's video you can see how correctly pronounce the word Bokeh.

I really hope that my girlfriend's grandmother (or any italian granma) will never see any of Jamie Oliver videos, and I hope for Jamie Oliver that she will never see one of his video and met him in person, because she will probably slap him in his face. Personally I think that every time he put the words "real", "original", "traditional" in a phrase that contains "italian" as well, he offends an entire country and its culture. He just doesn't have a fuckin clue on how to cook italian recipes.

A few weeks ago I saw this video above on FStoppers, and while I can understand americans and british, or any other population apart from italians, why they could think "Wow this guy is amazing", seen from an italian, or at least from an italian who has at least a minimal knowlegde of how to prepare food, the only sensation I can image is pure "rage". Rage for how he treats food. He looks like he wants to rape the food, not actually eat it.
And those fuckin lemons... Why in hell you would use all those lemons? What's your problem with lemons Jamie? You don't put slices of lemons on a fuckin pasta, maybe a bit of lemon juice, but not slices, and not that many for fuck sake. And at the end what do you show? Something that is at least presentable? No. You just do a feckin mess.

So, my dear readers, always bear in mind that whatever he cooks, is very, very far away from real italian cuisine.

(via FStoppers)
 

Here we are with another interesting Matt Granger's video, and this time he is talking about the question of "is it OK to touch the model?".
Personally I do the same, I prefer not to touch the model and trying to mimic the pose, even I end up to look a bit funny, rather than go there and move a person like a puppet, which is bad, but in general I don't really do that often as I prefer to dictated as less as possible what a person should do. Anyway, enjoy this video :-)

(via ThatNikonGuy)