… and American Express is promising to pay for the trip! Unfortunately, there will be no site seeing or partying this time. Instead, my good ol’ pal is going for a quick checkup at Nikon clinic and possibly will undergo a minor routine surgery. However, doctors do promise full recovery in no time, and one of the oldest and most trusted credit cards of mine is promising to pick up the bill.

Apparently my D70 seem to be having a bit of a vision problem. To be precise - DOF (Depth Of Field) Preview button is malfunctioning. When I try to DOF Preview - the viewfinder goes completely dark. I tested it with both of my lenses and unfortunately (or may be fortunately?) this seems to be a problem with the body. After searching nikonians.org and reading up on the symptoms I found out that shutter release circuitry is shared with the DOF Preview functionality and there are known cases when malfunctions in the former can cause issues with the latter. A quick call to Nikon customer service resulted in somewhat unavoidable verdict - the patient has be admitted.

Even though at this time the glitch only manifests itself as a DOF preview button failure, and I have never used DOF preview function since I purchased this camera - I decided to go ahead and mail it in, due to a couple of reasons: it’s nice to have 100% functional camera (if DOF is not working, who’s not to say what else has gone or about to go bad) and what’s most important - this coming April will mark two years since I bought this camera, and as it turns out, American Express automatically extends manufacturer’s warranty (which was only 1 year) by another year if you charged your entire purchase (which I did) to the card. I called them up earlier today, just to confirm, and sure enough they’re standing behind their promise. So, hopefully (keeping my fingers crossed), this repair will be on them. Otherwise, I would probably lived without DOF preview, as I did for two years…

The picture above was taken with my new Nikkor 70-200mm VR lens last weekend at Fort DeSoto park.

Except for when there is no light… And in photography, that often means - no action. No action, unless you have one of those so-called “fast” lenses - a lens with a very wide aperture, usually f/2.8 or wider. Wide aperture allows for more light to enter your camera, which translates into acceptable (read - faster) shutter speeds. Acceptable, to where you can catch something in the action and “freeze” it, or as photographers often say - “stop the action”. I never owner a fast lens before, and I tend to shy away from higher ISOs simply because D70 is not quite good at it (that’s probably the only reason I consider upgrading every once in a while), so no light for me has always meant - no action. Last night, as we were coming back from Ana Maria island beach I was playing with my recently acquired Nikkor 70-200mm VR and managed to snap this picture:

Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8D G-AFS ED-IF VR lens, f/2.8, 1/30, VR on, Active on, 70mm, continuous shutter mode - 5 shots takes, only 1 winner. Of course active VR helped a lot, I was in a moving car… and f/2.8 was what allowed me to shoot the other moving cars without any blur. I’m quite impressed :-)

Is there a package, a package for me, eh?

Last year’s company performance results are in… Looks like we did okay… Apparently my contribution has been recognized as well; hence, a little bit of a reward showed up on my last paycheck. Just in time :) I got tired of drooling over the 70-200 VR and decided to go for it. I figured, I’ll never get over it unless I try it out myself. I decided to buy it on ebay, that way I can should be able to resell it and recover most of money, in case if this lens does not meet my expectations. And my expectations are:

1) It has to have awesome bokeh
2) It has to be crispy sharp
3) It has to be vividly colorful
4) It has to be fast, fast, fast!

I’ve been monitoring this lens on ebay for the last few weeks, and watched few of them going for well over $1400, which kind of surprised me, because for an extra $150-200 you could get yourself a brand new version of it…. Anyways, after few attempts and few unsuccessful bids, I finally managed to steal this particular one just for under $1,300…

And it finally arrived! First thing that pleasantly surprised me - it’s not THAT big and even though IS somewhat heavy, I can definitely lug it around more/less comfortably (or so it seems :) Since it’s a used lens, I carefully inspected optics and was happy to find out that the lens appears to be in an excellent shape. It does appear that it’s been used most of its life with a UV filter on and there are very few signs of wear on the exterior of the unit.

Work’s been pretty demanding lately and all this week I barely managed to break away for few hours every evening to go to gym, hence I couldn’t take it outside just yet… so, for now I’ve been snapping pics here and there inside my apartment… VR is performing flawlessly (for the most part), even though I think I can tell the difference between VR II (on my 18-200 VR) and VR version 1 on this lens - I get fewer “missed” shots with VR2. In the next few days I plan to take this lens outside and do some real life testing as well as quite scrupulous comparison to my 18-200 VR. Meanwhile, a couple of shots demonstrating 70-200’s amazing depth of field (or I should say lack thereof :-)

First shot - handheld at 105mm, f/2.8, 1/30, second shot - handheld at 200mm, f/2.8, 1/20… Obviously, no flash used. I did color-corrected and slightly sharpened both of them in photoshop.