Dave Benham

Nikon D700, 70-200 VR with 1.7 Teleconverter at 320mm, 1000th @ f/5.6, ISO 320

This Bank Holiday weekend I spent some time with fellow photographer Andrew Keen in Powys, Wales. We managed to pack in a lot in two days, including a trip to see Red Kites being fed at Gigrin Farm in Rhayader. Here are a few of my early favourite images – I’ll be blogging soon with more pictures and notes on the equipment and techniques we used.

From here we also managed to visit the Elan Valley with it’s spectacular old dams and reservoirs, and waterfalls near Lake Vyrnwy. The area’s being featured on BBC’s Springwatch series at the moment, you might even see us on there…

Nikon D700, 70-200 VR with 1.7 Teleconverter at 320mm, 2500th @ f/5.6, ISO 500

Nikon D700, 70-200 VR with 1.7 Teleconverter at 340mm, 2000th @ f/8, ISO 320

Nikon D700, 70-200 VR with 1.7 Teleconverter at 340mm, 2000th @ f/8, ISO 320

Last weekend the family trooped off to the coast – the cove to be more accurate, at Lulworth in Dorset. It’s an absolutely beautiful location and the weather was fantastic. We met up with a bunch of my wife Sam’s colleagues, many of which are keen photographers.

Gathering in the car park I looked at all the cameras around me and decided to rebel. There wasn’t a longer focal length than 24mm on display, so I swapped the 24-70 f/2.8 on my D700 for another good landscape lens – the AF-S 70-200 f/2.8.

What do you mean, I hear you ask? My logic was firstly that I didn’t want to come away with the same shots as everyone else. This meant a resolution that I wouldn’t take a shot of Durdle Door as well. Does that make me a bad man? Secondly I knew that there would lots of interesting areas of detail around the cove and buildings which would be fun to look for. The zoom lens should suit this down to a tee, as well as a few of my favourite people shots!

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I completed a pilgrimage of sorts recently by managing to visit Grays of Westminster. Based in Pimlico, this is an exclusively Nikon camera store from a bygone age.

It’s an interesting place, in perfect character with the surrounding stores in Westminster. Upstairs is where the new equipment is displayed, and pride of place belongs to the new D3X. Downstairs past their reading room is the second hand equipment – an array of F5 bodies in the first cabinet is testament to the demand of digital. The most recent second hand digital body was a D3, but I’m happy with my D700. Unless anyone wants to donate one of course…

Image courtesy of Prweb.com

Sendmehome describes itself as a free tool that lets you assign a unique code to anything. 

In essence you can generate a unique ID for anything – Camera, Iphone, pet dog etc – and if that item is lost the finder can enter the ID at sendmehome.com and see the information you’ve decided to share about it. If you want you can order custom labels at $3.99 a pack, or just make your own.

If you find the item you can then add to the item’s story online. As an example, someone left a disposable camera secured to a bench in Santa Barbara asking for people to take a few shots. There’s also a frying pan doing the rounds looking for the ultimate bacon recipe!

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep my blog up to date, and this last week was the first time I’ve been a bit slack. But I have an excuse or two!

Number one was the arrival of my second son, Thomas. Ok, so it stopped me posting to the blog for a week or so, but think of the photo opportunities he will create! Unlike last time I had my camera with me at the hospital and I’ll set a page up soon to show what a cute little chap he is.

Secondly my blog was featured on the Redweb Facebook page. Check it out – it’s a fantastic example of how social networking can be used to benefit your business. Redweb have a very talented design team and I’m proud to work with them. My blog is featured on the page, and the extra traffic made the old virtual private server creak a bit.

So I’ve moved up in the World – a dedicated server from Coreix. I know there are cheap servers to be had in the US, but I’ve got a UK domain name and I’d like to be hosted in this country if possible. Coreix have very keen prices, from basic Linux servers all the way through to full managed hosting. Service so far is very good (my new server was up within three hours, and I ordered at midnight!) and no outages.

Right, quick updates over, more news to follow soon…