Alessio Michelini Photography

A few days ago I posted a couple of pictures of a place here in Dublin, that I never had the chance to visit, even if it's not that far away from where I live, and as I had to bring the car back the morning after, I tried to give me another chances, and I woke up veeeery early in the morning (4.30am) to get to the same place but at sunrise. Obviously the place was amazing, nobody around, the sea was super calm, and so far it sounds very promising, but as we say in Italy, not all the donuts comes with the hole. Infact, even if it didn't rain, it was quite cloudy, so no sun at the horizon, no contrasty sky, but all pretty flat. Only at a later time, around 6, the clouds started to break a bit, but while with my eyes it looked quite good, on the camera you lose that sense of depth, and what it looks great at the moment, it's not that great when you look the pictures you took on the screen.
Anyway, these are okay shots for me, but I wanted to show you anyway, let me know what do you think guys.

When I read this photo release my first word was: "Really?!". They just became famous and already have a photo release like this one? Bear in mind guys that with this contract you can't do anything with your pictures, apart the use for the article for the magazine you are shooting for, so for me it goes straight away on the bands I will never photograph.

(via Music Photographers)

This might not be new for some of you, but for who doesn't, Glyn Dewis did this video that shows us a very simple technique to get a black background without any backdrop or even a studio, and you can do it almost anywhere (well maybe not if you are in a very sunny place, like the Sahara).

(via ISO1200 via Glyn Dewis)

This is an agreement that it doesn't grab any rights from the photographer, but it's a bit awkward: what does it mean the end of the first point "...and only during the period from the date of the Show until..."? Do these people know what is internet? An article when is up is up, there is no such things as posts that expires after a while. And what on printed magazines? Do they have to burn all the copies after a month? Who writes these agreements? A drunk monkey?

(via Music Photographers)

One of the main problems when it comes to make a timelapse is to have everything well exposed, and even if shooting everything in RAW helps, and shooting in Aperture Priority, letting the camera adjust itself it might help as well (even if I cannot see myself set my camera to AV, I'm an extremist, and for me only M and Bulb exist), it's not bulletproof, light condtions changes, a small cloud in front of the sun can drastically change the exposure from the previous shots, just to mention one of the possible problems. But there is one technique that it might be the answer for most of the problems and it makes timelapses look and easy job. The technique we are talking about is the Bulb Ramping.
In the video above, Joel Schat, shows us how it works, and in the video below, there is a clear example of what the results are using this technique.

(via FStoppers via Joel Schat)

Before I'm going to fall asleep, as I'm completely dead after two days of shooting for a client, and more than 3000 photos taken, I want to share these two photos I took tonite, despite I was barely able to drive as I had 0,0000001% energy left, I wanted to go in a place called Pigeon Road, which lead to one of the lighthouses of the Dublin bay (but it's only 5 minutes drive to where I live so it wasn't so hard at the end). Weather was perfect, light was perfect, I just couldn't resist, and even my also-really-tired-girlfriend couldn't say no, she wasn't happy, but she came with me anyway, and these two shots are the result of the half an hour spent in a beautiful day of May, here in Dublin, a city that after all these years can still give me some great new places to shoot.

(bigger on Flickr | buy it on RedBubble)

(bigger on Flickr | buy it on RedBubble)

Good night!

PVT, formed as Pivot (but they had to change the name due to copyright issues), are an experimental-rock/math-rock/electronic band from Sydney, and I have to admit that I barely knew the name until a few weeks ago, but then I found out that they were one of the main bands who were playing at the Camden Crawl Dublin, so I started to listen to them on Spotify, and I have to say that I really like their last album. Anyway, they were on my festival plans anyway as they were playing in the main venue, and probably the only one with good lights, as the other venues were all small with terrible lights (maybe only the Grand Social wasn't that bad).
I have to say that the lights, even if the venue has a decent lighting system, not the best, but still good, were barely ok, and probably the best gig I shoot that weekend was the PVT one (or maybe au pair with Echo & The Bunnymen), as the other ones were too smokey, or too dark. So here there are some of the best shots I took of PVT, but obviously you can see the full set by clicking here.

Yesterday I did my half review and half 3-songs-no-flash review, and I talked about the supporter band who played last saturday in Vicar St, so now it's time to talk about the main band, which in this case is a local band called Little Green Cars. The good thing of emerging bands, from a lighting point of view, is that the band don't really dictate of what kinds of lights to use on stage, they don't know, they don't care, so the guy who sits at the opposite side of the stage in the venue and looks like a DJ but without the headphones, is free to do whatever he wants, and in these cases the lights are generally good. Obviously these kind of bands don't have their lights normally, so you have to rely on the venue's lights, and if they are crap, you will get crap lights, despite how good or bad is the lighting guy. But in this case Vicar St has a great lighting setup, so I couldn't really complain saturday from that point of view, maybe the abused a bit with fog machine, and I have to say that I preferred the supporter band's lights, but it was pretty good anyway, and I brought home plenty of decent shots.
The band move quite enough on stage, they don't jump like grasshoppers on drugs, but they are not traffic lights as well, so I had a good variety of shots, which is always a good thing.
I also have to say that the band is pretty good on stage, I really liked their album, and they are really good performers despite the fact of being young and the fact that I think Vicar St is probably the biggest venue they played so far, but they did well on stage in my opinion. Anyway, pictures pictures pictures, here we are with some of the best pictures I took that night, but if you want more, you can get more on flickr, by clicking here. And please, feel free to leave a comment, let me know if you like them or you think they are shite and I should start a different hobby, like horse riding or selling used bombs.

Green Day's photo release, pretty standard, pretty annoying.

(via Music Photographers)

As a landscape photographers I cannot mention as Ansel Adams as one of the masters, or maybe The Master, of this branch of photography, and here there is a short but pretty rare interview made in 1971 and conducted by Steve James of the Eikon Gallery (Monterey CA). To see the interview just click here.

(via ISO1200)