Dave Benham

Adobe have released a public beta of Lightroom 3, the program that takes all the best photographic bits out of Photoshop.

I’ve said before that if you’re a photographer you owe it to yourself to give it a go. I know there are people that find Photoshop a bit scary, and Lightroom is much easier to manage, especially on a workflow basis. Personally I use Lightroom for 90% of my photographic work.

So what’s different? This is Tom Hogarty’s take, part of the Lightroom team:

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One of the things that kept me busy during August was the wedding of some close friends, Paul and Lucy. Not only did I put them together a website for their wedding (like the song requests for the reception?) but I also had a great time taking shots at the wedding itself.

It was the first wedding I’d been to in some time where I didn’t have some other responsibility so I could just concentrate on taking pics. I’ll post about this in more detail with some of my favourites as I work through them in Lightroom, however I thought I’d show off a brief bit of Photoshoppery. I knew Paul and Lucy were back from their honeymoon this weekend and I wanted to give them something, so armed with a copy of OK! magazine this is what I came up with!

It’s a bit of fun which they like. Please don’t sue me nice OK people!

Lenscoat make a range of neoprene covers for standard and telephoto lenses. One of those items that I probably wouldn’t need on a portrait session, but invaluable shooting from a hide. And it would spook guests at a wedding (just think of the candid shots you’d get!).

Prices on the 70-200 Nikon cover above start at $79.99, and I’ve got to admit I’m really tempted. There are a number of different camo styles to try too.

Although the Lenscoat site has covers up to 600mm listed, they do custom jobs too; check out the video for making a cover for Canon’s 1200mm f/5.6 lens on the Lenscoat home page.

Nikon have just announced the launch of the D300s, the successor to the number one selling D300. Aimed at the prosumer, the D300s will be the flagship DX body for Nikon ahead of the D90.

The most striking addition is the ability to record HD video. As I’ve discussed before, I’m not a fan of video on DSLRs so this isn’t a big point for me. Dual memory card slots is useful though – that was one of the features from the D3 that I would have loved on the D700. Apart from this the only other headline grabber is a new Quiet Shutter mode, which locks the mirror up for a while when you take the shot. I’ve never considered Nikon shutters to be noisy in the first place but this will be useful for wedding or nature photographers at those critical moments.

The only update I can see on the new 18-200mm DX VR lens is a focus lock button – the VR side of things hasn’t been changed. The original version is still a cracking lens and in my opinion should be in the arsenal of all Nikon DX users.

Nikon have also announced an update to the popular (and my favourite) 70-200 AF-S VR lens. Some criticism was levelled at the first version mentioning soft corners; personally I’ve never experienced this to any great degree. This new version is optimised for FX users (D700, D3, D3X) and the VR is boosted too – it’s going to be a wonderful lens, but I’m not upgrading yet.

Details of all the new gear is on the Nikon website.

Have you seen the car insurance advert with Iggy Pop – “I’m not selling car insurance, I’m selling time.” Well Mr Pop, I’d like to buy some time please. Preferably to be inserted just before my alarm is meant to go off in the morning.

Sadly Iggy can’t really help me. But there are a number of ways of improving my workflow that really will save time. I’ve mentioned before that I use Lightroom to process my images, which already saves me loads of time. About 95% of my adjustments (white balance, the odd crop here and there) are done from Lightroom. Photoshop is there if needed, but I only tend to fire this up for serious image resizing or complex edits. Photoshop is for the designer; Lightroom is for the photographer.

I’ve installed a new plugin this week which lets you export your files directly from Lightroom to Flickr. It’s a brilliant piece of work by Jeffrey Friedl. Working as part of the export process, it uses the Flickr API to automatically upload your pictures using the keywords as tags. Metadata can be expanded or restricted as well. Download the Lightroom Flickr plugin from Jeffrey’s blog and see what I mean! It will even tweet out when you’ve added the pictures if you want.

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