Show above is lead guitarist and legend string man Robbie from itchy trigger finger performing at ballykeefe.

The slight burst of green light in the background gives a little depth to the image as the soft focus forces Robbie into the extreme foreground. I am really liking the clarity of this 50mm! The stage looks huge!

A few weeks back I read an instruction on how to configure my camera (350D) to shoot in RAW. I’ve been hearing about RAW a lot recently as i dig deeper into the possibilities with different formats and styles in photography. The first main difference i found is, RAW is HUGE!! Using a 2GB Compact Flash card i could store over 650 photos in JPEG large format. This is considerably reduced to 169 photos in RAW. Interesting enough though, when shooting RAW on the Canon 350D, you might notice you have duplicate images when importing. This is because the built LCD display screen cant display RAW files, it needs a smaller format, hence makes a duplicate processed image.

The best thing about RAW is of course, you can do all the processing when you get onto your computer. I use photoshop CS3 (the best program in the world!). When you open the RAW file (the extension on my images is .CR2, a canon RAW format), you get presented with a new window, well, it was new to me. This new window is basically the manual replacement for all the in-built magical processing that pretty much determines the cost of your camera! Most of these settings are available for JPEG but you really do get a serious amount of control when mastering the colours, tones, shades and lights and pretty much every bit of visual information of the photo!

Shown above is a image of Norm Power (my new business partner – more on that later) playing with Tame in the Zoo underground, kilkenny. Now, you might notice there a few pictures of this amasing guitarist, thats simply because the guy really likes to pose on stage!

I had a bit of fun playing with this photo during work. Reducing mid-tones, increasing highlights and shadows to give the dark sinister effect. I hope you like it!