Dave Benham

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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I love having a project to aim at and thanks to Strobist and Clay Enos I’ve found one. Urban portraits!

The prospect of taking pictures of complete strangers creates all sorts of feelings. I like Clay’s approach in the video above. At some point every photographer has to overcome that barrier, whether it’s a portrait session, wedding or whatever. The subject needs to be comfortable with you, and you need to be comfortable with that process. Clay doesn’t give the subjects much time to think about the situation, and as a result comes away with some great results.

Can I translate this into a series of portraits of my sleepy New Forest village? I don’t know. But I’ll relish the challenge!

Nikon D700, 70-200 f/2.8 VR, 1/320 at f/5.6, ISO 1000

This last week has been Carnival week in Sway. It’s a great community event with everyone joining in lots of events, from treasure hunts and scarecrow making to the fete and carnival procession itself. My team improved one place in the village cryptic treasure hunt this year – second by only half a point! Next year…

For the carnival procession I bolted on my MB-D10 grip to the D700 and used the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR lens. As it was so overcast I had the auto ISO on, but started it at ISO 1000. I was shooting mostly in aperture priority at f/5.6 which in turn gave me a shutter speed to avoid camera shake. The only problem I had was the focussing distance – people gravitated towards the camera and I couldn’t get the shot!

I’ll put a few shots up from the carnival soon, above are the Carnival Prince and Princess who led the procession. Who needs Rio!

PDN Gear Guide featured an article yesterday on a gadget developed to stop pictures being taken of celebs (or Big Brother contestants) without their consent.

Consisting of a sensor attached to a set of LEDs, the device detects the light of a flashgun and emits enough bright light to wash out the picture. The project is a brainchild of NY University graduate Adam Harvey, who is working to patent the device and reduce the size.

Of course if you’re shooting with a D700 or D3 you could ramp up the ISO without flash and beat the system… for now.

Read the full article at PDN Gear Guide here, and check out Adam Harvey’s site for full details of the project.

Picture above courtesy Adam Harvey / ahprojects.com