It’s suprising how easily distracted one can get when there are buckets of photos to be put up online.  Its gotten a little dead around the rayobrien.com shelves.  Not that many gigs going on at the same time that i have a night off.  And a night not off was a long time ago!  With a few days this week to scratch my bum a little i have decided (not influenced at all by Aido giving out to me at the weekend) to dig up some old photos that should have gone up ages ago.  Im also going to start taking more photos again.  I have a CD cover to prepare for.  Concept art is done, now all i have to do is create the assets and build the full res layout and piece it all together.  Oh, and of course, release the CD long side a big green mushroom cloud!

Shown bellow is a series of photos taken during the last second edition of Trig promotions featuring; first time on stage “A Message from Vega”, nationwide known Tool tribute band “The Grudge” and one of Dublin’s biggest metal outfits “Hero in Error” with their really tight t-shirts for sale!?!  Even Jimmy had trouble fitting into a small.  Best cut out those cheese burgers dude

A message from Vega:

The Grudge:

Hero in Error:

Group Shot:

Apologies again to everyone for the lateness of the photos.

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!