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.

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.

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)

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

(via Music Photographers)

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