Alessio Michelini Photography

I generally don't shoot supporter bands, not because I'm a dick (or am I?) but because I become lazy in the past few years and I always arrive in the venue when the supporter band finishes, but this time the gig was late, and the second supporter band started at the time the main band starts, so at the end Gypsies on the Autobahn became the first band I shot with my brand new camera, the Canon 6D, and beside I have to say that I really like the performance of this band, and they were the perfect models for my "tests shots".
How you can easily understand, this is some sort of quick review of my new camera rather than a normal 3-songs-no-flash review, but I think music photography is probably one of the best fields where you can tell if a camera is good or not. And how it turned out? Well, damn good.

Here we are with another great tutorial by Aaron Nace of Phlearn.com, and in this lesson he is going to show us how to take multiple exposures and then combine them later in Photoshop.

(via Phlearn)

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.

This is a very interesting strobist tutorial, that shows how award-winning photographer Lauri Laukkanen made his WWII inspired photos, which are pretty impressive I have to say. If you want to read the full story from Lauri, please take a read on his article on SRL Lounge.

(via SLR Lounge)

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

This one is so bad that makes me laugh,and what's the meaning of the point 2? Another "artist" that I will never photograph. Just stay at home guys, don't waste your time.

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

Sometimes happens that you go to a gig of someone that you have no clue of who the fuck he is, and in this case I seriously had no idea, but even if you don't know a single song, you have that feeling that is going to be a shite gig, at least musically, but at the end it turns out that the guy on stage, is actually good. And this is the case of the Passenger.
The fact that the 90% of audience was made of girls, and the 67% of them proved that they can reach a very high pitch with their voice, didn't help a lot on my pre-gig impression. Plus the fact that, apart one amp, a microphone, and plenty of ikea paper lamps, the stage was completely empty, which you can obviously translate into a one man gig, and in these cases you come back home with a lot of pictures of the same subject, which is kinda boring (apart from The Tallest Man On Earth, he is pretty cool on stage, he moves a lot and mess more than many other bands). But despite the promises, he was pretty good on stage, and the Ikea lamps did work pretty well as a background, and Vicar St has pretty great lights as well, at the same level of the Olympia, but in a more compressed stage.
Anyway, at the end I brought home plenty of good pictures, not the bests I've done in the last while, but pretty good, and Passenger is a pretty good performer on stage, so well worth it to see.
Down here you can find some of the best shots I took last night, but you can obviously see the full set by clicking here.

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?