The New 300

I love new toys. Especially photography related ones. It might be a new gradient filter, or some other tech item like my iPad 2 (love it as a reader!) Recently I invested in some “Big Glass” which in photographer parlance suggests major reach and wide-wide aperture (in this case, it is a Nikkor 300mm f2.8). As I mentioned back in this post, I had been borrowing a 200-400 f4 and had fun with gathering a few images before sending it back to my friend, Herb. I’m hoping that my purchase of this lens will be a better choice for my style than the slower f4 option…

My rationale was multi-fold. The price point was more attractive than a 200-400 f4 VR II which sneaks in somewhere near the $8000 range, but more than that, I’m hopeful that the f2.8 will give me more light with decent reach for my early-morning wildlife pursuits.

Anyhow, because I was so anxious to try out the new lens, I get to add another category to the blog: sports! Here are a few shots from last night. They’ve been run through Dfine 2.0 to reduce the the high-iso noise, but otherwise are untouched out of camera. Overall I’m certainly pleased with the results and look forward to hauling the behemoth out periodically to capture the world.