Alessio Michelini Photography

I supposed to see these guys this autumn, but apparentely I'll better stay home, as this nice contract is just silly.
You can't use your pictures beyond the publication you are shooting for and they pretend a copy of your photos, that they can use for whatever they want without pay you a single cent, even if they don't specify the size of the photos you have to send them, so if you want to photograph this band anyway, do me a favour, send them thumbnails, like 50 x 50 pixels.

(via Music Photographers)

I know, in the past few days I kinda forgot about this blog, but I've been superbusy and I really couldn't find a minute to write a post. Anyway, I've a couple of articles on the way, but while I'm still working on them I wanted to share this cool tutorial from Aaron Nace of Phlearn.com, which is going to explain us how to blend patterns to our photos in Photoshop.

(via Phlearn.com)

Here we are with the second part of my weekend spent with my camera. You are already excited isn't it? Anyway, let me go through this thing, I've done a part one and now I can't just skip the second part. So, Sundayyy!
On that day my girlfriend has to work for a few hours in Malahide, so I decided to be a nice boyfriend, and I went there to take some photos, so when she finished I was there, but before that, I wondered around that area trying to find something interesting to snap. Originally I meant to go to a point, not too far away from the town centre, where I could see the bridge that connect Malahide and Donabate, which it looks pretty interesting to photograph, but unfortunately that point is in a private area, so I had to give up.

Then I was hoping to get some nice long exposure in the sea, but with the low tide there were nothing really interesting to photograph, well, at least not like I wanted, and after a few shots like these ones...

In this interesting, and quite long (about 47 minutes), Joel Grimes explains the process he uses to create his amazing composite portraits. It is a bit long, but he goes through every single steps of his work process. Really, really interesting.

(via FStoppers)

This bank holiday has been pretty productive to me, as my girlfriend was working for the whole weekend, I have plenty of time to spend with my other love: photography. But going back a couple of days, on thursday I tried, again, to photograph a thing, that's the best word I can come up. It's a wall on the beach, in Sydney Parade (which it sounds like a place in Australia, but, big surprise, it's here in Dublin), and I dunno why they build it, for what reason, or who did it, but for me it's just a cool wall in the water.
If you want to go to see this place, here is the map:

View Larger Map

I tried to photograph it plenty of times, and I always got there with the low tide, all the fuckin times, and with the low tide that thing is pointless to photograph for me, even this time I tried, but it just doesn't work, it's not more than a "meh", so at the end the result, apart one single shot, was to photograph everything else but that wall.

I have to admit it, I'm a bit late for this post, I've already talked about their supporter band a few days ago, but in the past weeks I've been working as a crazy and I couldn't find the time write anything, and this weekend I've been around trying to do some landscape snaps around here, and I also tried to go through 3000 photos I took for a client a few weeks ago, so I'm using this bank holiday to try to write some new on the blog. Anyway, The Riptide Movement are a really cool band , that it may sound a bit outdate for some of you as they play a mix of folk rock & blues, but they are totally worth to see (and listen). And they are nice people too, as they gave me a triple A pass for their show, so this time I could take some pictures from a different prospective. Light wise the show was really good, not the best, but really cool to photograph, especially because the Olympia has a very good light set up, so even if the artist doesn't bring a light, you still get good lights.
Also this band doesn't fall in the category of the "poles with musical instruments" (which it makes the gig quite boring to photograph), and neither on the "grasshoppers under steroids" (which it makes the gig nearly impossible to photograph), so you have the good mix of different poses and expression that makes the photographs more interesting, rather than a repetition of same faces.
To conclude, it's a great gig to photograph and it's a great band to see live, and here there are some of the best pictures I took that night, which you can also find on my flickr account.

In this very interesting video, SLRLounge contributor Lauri Laukkanen is going to show us three different techniques to increase the sharpness of an image in Photoshop.
Personally I prefer the first one (and I guess is the same for Lauri), but I use slightly different settings, like I stay between 1 and 2 in the High Pass Filter, and then I used Overlay, but at the end the result is the same.

(via Lauri Laukkanen)

This one is pretty standard, I still don't like it, but at least they don't grab any rights from the photographer, and adding in editorial use flickr, facebook and my site should cover what I need. Essentially they don't want you to use those pictures to sell gadgets or make money out of it, but that's it. To be fair it's a quite honest release, at least compared to other bands like Of Monsters And Men.

(via Music Photographers)

As I said before, I generally skip supporter bands, for many reasons but mostly because I generally arrive too late. But this time I got to the venue in time to catch the last few songs of the The Riptide Movement's supporters, an irish band called Preachers Sons. Lights were perfect, they were pretty good performers and quite good looking (especially the bass player), so I couldn't resist to take some pictures. And I have to say it turned out some good shots, and guess what? I'm going to show you the best ones :-)

I have to say that the only reason I went to this gig was to see an Italian playing in an irish venue, something that doesn't happen very often, as there are not many italian artists famous outside the "Bel Paese". Thankfully (for him) a lot of irish people still remember the song "Senza una donna", but as you can easily imagine the crowd wasn't that young, actually with my 33 years on this planet I felt very young that night, and it wasn't a big surprise to find out that at least 1/3 of the crowd were italians. But I'm not going to discuss about his music, I don't like it, and I left after the 3rd song, he is a good performer, he has plenty of people on stage that move and play around, and that's it.
The problem is because of his audience, and also because he can't really do a sold out on an irish venue, the show was a seated one, and for a photographer this is a big pain in the arse. Obviously no pit (as you would stay on the line of sight of the people, and that's pretty fair as they have all the right to see a show they paid without having someone in front of them with a bloody camera), so the only option is to photograph from the side aisles of the venue, and if you don't have a lens long enough, you are screwed.
Good thing I knew it, so I brought my 135mm L, and I was pretty safe. Lights were generally good, even if shooting from the sides you can't really play that much with lights, especially for me that I use a lot the backlit lights. So at the end I brought home some decent shots, not super happy, but still better than the average gigs taken from the aisles. Anyway, these are some of the best shots, but you can obviously see the full set on my flickr account.