Most people know David Sifry as the serial entrepreneur who founded the blog search engine Technorati, but during a recent weekend I learned that he is also an accomplished photographer.

The above photo of David is by another friend, Loic Le Meur and the below photo was taken by David during the weekend at Martin Varsavsky’s farm, Torrenova, in Menorca.

Not only was I impressed with David’s photographs and his determination to carry around a tripod and other equipment, but also the workflow he uses for dealing with huge numbers of large digital images. What follows is technical, but could prove useful to others.

In terms of equipment, David uses a basalt tripod that is light, but very steady. The main lens for his Canon EOS 5D is a 70-200 zoom with a maximum aperture of 2.8.

Shooting only in RAW (the largest size files), he downloads images into a portable 160 GB LaCie drive that he always carries. He has a back-up system when he gets home.

The images are imported into iView Media Pro, which allows for quick navigation to compare which image is best (If you type Apple / you can compare three images at once.) Instead of deleting files (he does not believe in deleting) David types cntrl-3 to rate a photo as having 3-stars. At the end of the process, he can ask the program to only show photos with 3 stars.

Those he likes are then opened up in Photoshop CS3 where he fiddles with light balance, exposure, contrast and sharpening (zooming in to see grain) as well as luminance to give better skintone. Once the settings are good for one photo, he applies all the changes to photos taken in the same session. This makes for very fast adjustment to a large number of photos.

At that point he uploads the images to Flickr and uses Quicksilver to save digital negatives for those he wants to print (using a $300 Canon i9900 printer).

Another program he is considering is Adobe’s Light Room instead of iView Media Pro.

Any further suggestions for digital photo workflow are very welcome!!

UPDATE: Dave posted corrections/additions in a comment below.

Technorati Tags: torrenova, torrenova2007, david sifry, martin varsavsky, menorca, loic le meur