Here’s a few stills from some footage I’ve been shooting on my wanders around New York with my Canon 7D and 2.8 lens. I’m editing them into some shape of a video to give a flavour of New York in the summer but as with all undefined projects, when are you finished? Especially when it’s a city that keeps throwing up some amazing sights.

The two things that stand out the most for me are the camera’s low light performance which means you can capture night scenes as you see them. I’ve written about this before but it’s great to have this performance in such an unassuming camera. Then there’s the crazy weather! Stifling humidity and frightening thunderstorms. Bring on September.

A great singer-songwriter Pete Fagan asked me to record his performance at the Apollo Sessions last night in The Bleeding Horse, Camden Street, Dublin. I saw Pete perform for the first time only a few months and I was amazed with his voice and his performance. Here his is playing a brilliant new song he wrote called Smile.

The charity song, Haiti Child, the video for which I shot and edited, charted last week at number 29 (see the Irish video chart show clip below). Everyone involved worked really hard to get it this far and they’re doing the same this week again so hopefully we’ll have a really high chart placing this weekend. It’s also now available in the rather cool Tower Records on Wicklow Street (off Grafton Street) in Dublin.

More details about the song and where to buy it can be found here and here.

Here’s the official video for the charity song, Haiti Child, which I shot and cut. Full time nurse Elaine Doonan from Kerry wrote the song after hearing of how a 22 day old child was found alive beneath the rubble, 7 days after the devastating earthquake in Haiti. You can read more about the song, and everyone involved with, it here. It’s a brilliant song that has been in my head since I heard it live on it’s pubic debut.

There’s a great vitality to the song that hit me when I was recording the live version weeks before and I looked to capture that during the studio shoot and especially through the edit.

I shot the video during the one day recording session in Dublin (while tip-toeing around the wooden-floored recording rooms in my socks) using the Canon 7D SLR and a basic Canon 50mm, 1.8 EF lens. I wasn’t shooting in so much as ‘low light’ as I was in ‘no light’! The musicians preferred to work in near darkness (except for Davey on the mandolin, who not only had all the lights on but also had a 3-bar heater on full belt, in case his tan faded or something), which meant that despite the 1.8 lens I was on 1/30 sec and had to blast the ISO up to 4,000, though the noise level was very acceptable, for video anyway.

Enjoy, it’s a great song.

***Update*** March 5th, Haiti Child has entered the Irish Charts at number 29, here’s hoping for more success!

I was shooting last week in the scrum of the ‘orange’ carpet at the Meteor Music Awards, for the legends that are The Stylebitches, when one Dizzee put Laura in a tizzee, she lost all control! See the video below, or you’re having problems doing that, or using and iPhone, click here to watch it on youtube.

Some tech specs too, the video was shot on the Canon 7D SLR with the EF-S 17-55mm, f2.8 lens. Audio was recorded through a Zoom H4 recorder with a Rode NTG1 microphone and synced later because of the horrible sounding Auto Gain Control on the 7D. So there.

The great thing about Blanaid is that she’s always dressed-to-be-photographed, so every now and then we do some impromptu shoots. The one in pink was for the blog ‘Blaubushka,’ as part in their ‘Blogging for Boobs’ campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer by asking bloggers for pink-themed pictures. It was cold, dark and wet that day so naturally we decided to go to the muddy field in front of my house. The others pictures were grabbed while making our way through the garden of Blanaid’s new place.

I like to shoot outdoors, it just seems more natural to me. It generally gives the pictures a bigger production value than a studio shoot, much in the same way that a film shot on location will look more ‘money’ than one shot in a studio. It’s the reason I find it hard to watch studio shot dramas ranging from RTE’s The Clinic and Raw to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The plywood walls and studio lights of a set never visually pass as a real bricks and mortar location. But hey, I’m raving a little here…

Blanaid goes into more detail about her clothes in the shoots here and here.

The great Irish model Karen Fitzpatrick and I had been talking about doing a shoot together. Then the country was besieged with snow, so we decided one afternoon to get out there and get some shots done in the snow because, we thought, who knows how long it would last. Little did we know…

Anyway, it was a fun shoot and she was great to work, especially given the conditions we were out in!

My good friend Blanaid Hennessy from blanaid.com asked me for a gritty, dirty shoot for her site, so off to a junk yard we went! She’s an incredibly talented stylist, model, ideas person, cook, friend…the list goes on.