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

Nikon D700, 17-35mm AF-S at 17mm, 1/400th at f/8

Local hotel and restaurant Sway Manor hosted an event for the local Morgan sports car owners club last weekend. One of the most fantastic things about these cars is their individuality – no two are the same. It was a fantastic opportunity to give the AF-S 17-35mm lens a bit of a run out.

It’s the first time I’ve had a lens wider than 24mm to try on full frame, and it does quite literally open up a new raft of challenges. You’re potentially including so much more in the frame and composition needs to be careful and considered. The light will be varied across the frame so the exposure may have to be metered from several areas. And there’s the small matter of distortion – creatively intended or otherwise! (more…)

Techcrunch featured a report on a new startup yesterday which aims to let photographers sell images from their site without sending visitors off to a third party store. Currently in closed beta for US customers only, Fotomoto allows you to add a couple of lines of code to your templates and their widget will index your images. As Techcrunch explains,

Fotomoto does things differently: photographers only need to insert a few lines of codes in their website, after which the images on his or her website will automatically be indexed and automatically provided with a ‘purchase photo’ link. Sellers can tweak the settings so the ‘buy’ links appear completely integrated and branded to match their sites’ look and feel, and the back-end of the tool enables them to set the availability next to the sizes and pricing of the photos. When visitors click the link to buy photos, a Fotomoto widget pops up and enables them to instantly purchase images through PayPal (with the ability to pay by credit card coming later this month). There’s also a sharing link, which lets people send the picture to others as an e-card, with the ability to push to social networking and bookmarking services coming in a couple of weeks.

There are no monthly costs, just a commission fee based on the image price and product chosen. At the moment there are just prints available, but this will expand into t-shirts, mugs etc in due course. I’m looking forward to this being available for UK sites – it’s definitely going on my blog then. 

Read the full article on Fotomoto at Techcrunch here, and if you’re interested sign up to the beta program here.

Cokin has launched a specialist X-Pro filter holder for the Nikon 14-24mm wide angle lens. The 14-24 has a bulbous front element with no filter thread so the holder attaches to the lens hood itself. The bad news is that for full frame users you’ll get vignetting if you shoot any wider than 18mm. No problem for DX shooters, but lots of D3X, D3 and D700 owners will be impacted.

This is one of the reasons that I chose the AF-S 17-35 f/2.8 over the 14-24 – I’d be paranoid about scratching the front element every time I used it. The 17-35 uses the same 77mm filters as my 24-70 f/2.8 and 70-200 VR. One (admittedly expensive) circular polariser will suit all three.

Oh, and it costs $624.95. But at least the shipping’s free. If you’re interested, you can order the filter holder from Adorama here.

I list Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski’s blogs as essential reading – both are great photographers and experts on Adobe software. Recently they’ve started a weekly show for Nikon digital SLR users called D-town TV. Now in to its eleventh episode, this week they look at the essential settings you should change when you first take a Nikon digital SLR out of the box. There’s some really useful tips:

• Not letting the shutter fire if there’s no memory card – this hasn’t happened to me yet but you hear of the horror stories!
• Using the rear scroll wheel to move through the pictures you’ve taken (instead of using the multiselector).
• Instant zoom in on an image using the centre button on the multiselector
• Customising menus for frequently changed settings.

Rather than go through exactly how to do each of these watch the episode – you can find it at Nikon D Town TV.