Last night Miguello and I went downtown on a photosafari. Unlike major metropolitan cities, Tampa’s downtown is completely deserted by 7pm on weekdays and even on weekends unless there is a major event taking place at St. Petersburg Times Forum. So, being in downtown of Tampa “after hours” feels a bit weird - you’re in a what is supposed to be heavily populated/busy area, but there are no people around you. Trees, buildings, sidewalks look clean and well maintained, yet there are no signs of life anywhere.

So we walked around, snapped plenty of pictures and had a lot of fun. We will definitely do it again - there are plenty of interesting spots left yet to be photographed :) Out of almost 500 shots I snapped, I picked out about 30, and out of those I’m especially proud with may be two or three :-) But the entire gallery which I put together, actually turned out quite well. Have a look for yourself and let me know what you think!

Tampa Downtown Photosafari Gallery

Ever since I sold my condo which was right by the Flatwoods Park (I could literally hop a fence and be there, which I used to do all the time), I haven’t been riding much. For some reason it seems now like a lot of troubles getting a bike on a car rack, driving to the park, etc. I did go road biking few times this year, but haven’t managed to take my trek 4500 out much lately. So, a couple of days ago, all of a sudden I decided that I wanna go ride at Flatwoods and for the first time ever I took my D70 with me on the ride.

Unfortunately, it was kind of late when I left, so I didn’t get much time before dusk settled in. I snapped about a dozen of pictures and spent the rest of the time riding. What can I say… my back wasn’t up for it :) After about 40 mins it voiced its concerns regarding the length of the trip and then withing next 20mins, realizing that I’m not surrendering, it made my life really miserable :) But I did make it to the finish, clocking about an hour and thirty minutes for the entire ride (which is not much, considering all the stops for picture taking). Here is the gallery.

Long long time ago (I think sometime in the 80’s), a very good friend of our family gave me a very expensive (at the time) present - a “photo rifle” (as it was called back then). I think I was in high school when I got it and really, I wasn’t that much into photography. I played with it for a few months, found 300mm lens being quite inconvenient for taking landscape pictures (which was pretty much all I was doing with a camera back then) and put it away for many many years.

This time I dug it out of the “family closet” and took a closer look at the “wonder of Soviet engineering”. The camera was severely damaged (probably due to the multiple moves we made over the time), the lens itself was very dusty, and some of the metal parts of the “rifle” began to rust.

Overall the setup looks quite cool, I must admit :) However, considering this lens has no CPU, starts with aperture 4 (I think), and would require some sort of a converter to fit my D70, I decided that I don’t want this monster - it is a no match for my 70-200 f/2.8 VR anyways :-) So, I placed “for sale” ad on a local forum, got a couple of offers, and a week later sold it for $30. I’m glad it’ll serve somebody else, instead of collecting dust in our closet. The money went toward a new electric saw for my dad, who’s now building a family cabin with his own hands.

I got a little bit carried away taking pictures of sea gals “fishing”, and so I decided to dedicate them a separate album. These guys were literally pulling little fish out of the water or digging them out of the sand.

To my surpirse, lots of pictures turned out quite well and reuqired no post processing. I did have to crop most of them (200mm is definitely not enough for wildlife photography), but that was pretty much all I had to do. Enjoy!

“Culture shock” would be a good way to describe the way I felt my first day in Odessa. Every time I come here the city changes so much… And there is always soooo much going on around here. As we were driving home from the train station my brother proudly announced that he’s got us tickets to go see a Moscow jazz band (Trans Atlantic) playing with an American Jazz star - Eric Marienthal. I knew nothing about either one of them; however, it all sounded like fun anyways. Unfortunately, something came up at work and neither my brother nor my dad could make it to the concert that night, so my mom and I went by ourselves…

And what a concert it was! No words can express what we saw and heard… Eric, as well as the rest of the guys were simply incredible. My mom cried watching them play. After the concert I read few local blogs and everyone was simply stunned by their virtuosity and talent.

Luckly, I just happened to have my D70 with me (with the 70-200mm f/2.8 VR). I had to crank ISO all the way to 1000; however, built in noise reduction did a marvelous job as you can witness here.

Tonight, Florida Orchestra concluded its free “Pops in the park” series of the 2006-2007 season with an amazing performance at a park in north Tampa. Lots of our friends came out to see this concert, and we all truly enjoyed a wonderful night of beautiful music. The smog from the burning fires in northern parts of Florida has finally cleared up and for the first time in last couple of weeks, being outdoors was quite pleasant again.

I did not have my camera with me this time; however, I did manage to snap few good photos last time the orchestra performed at the Coachman Park (Clearwater) less than a month ago. Unfortunately, the custom curve I had loaded after I got my D70 back from service was a bit too aggressive which resulted in minor loss of highlights, but overall I was quite pleased with the performance of the 70-200 VR. The picture I’m posting here is of a friend of ours - Eugene Bazhanov, Assistant Principal Second. He has been with The Florida Orchestra since 1991 and I’ve been fortunate to know him since the spring of last year. Tomorrow he’s celebrating his birthday, so I’m sure I’ll have some more pictures of him to report very soon! :-)

… 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.

It’ve been dreaming about this lens for quite some time now - the legendary Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8D G-AFS ED-IF VR. It’s a bit on the expensive side - $1,614.95 new or around $1300sh used, and few years ago I just knew that I couldn’t afford it… which made things a lot more simple :-) Now, not having a mortgage or car payments, I think I could manage at least “ebay” version of it… Unfortunately, the problem is not so much in the financial aspect…

Being an absolutely incredible piece of optics which Nikon has ever produced, this lens takes astonishing pictures. Today I was going through samples of pbase images taken with this lens and came across Michael J. Masiewicz’s Nikon 70-200 VR Samples gallery (click on the image below to see it).

The lens is sharp… and it also delivers natural and vibrant colors. But there is something else about it that sends my heart racing - 70-200’s creamy-beautiful bokeh. For those of you who may not know what bokeh is - in few words, it’s the blury background which often deliberately caused to be out-of-focus to reduce distractions and to emphasize the primary subject. In my opinion, in portrait photography bokeh can either make or break a picture. One of the first lenses I used on my D70 was a cheap 28-300 Tamron. It was a very soft lens, yet its bokeh was quite impressive… Even since I just can’t get over the harsh bokeh of my 18-200 VR.

As you’re browsing Mike’s gallery notice how nice and smooth is the background on the close ups, and at the same time how sharp and vibrant is the main subject of each composition. Excellent bokeh, shallow depth of field and very natural colors - truly amazing glass.

So what’s the problem, you might say? Get yourself this lens and get on with your life! The problem is… this lens is very big and heavy. I know for a fact I won’t be able to take it with me on a trip to Europe, or to a party at a friend’s house, or on a night out… So what’s good is it to have such an incredible piece of equipment and not being able to use it ALL THE TIME??? As a matter of fact, few nikonians on the forums I’ve been reading admitted this being a huge issue for them as well. Hence my dilemma… I really really like the 70-200 VR, but I just can’t see myself lugging it around… :-((

I spent last several days looking for alternatives. I’ve been researching the Nikkor 85mm f/1.8D. Priced at $400 new it’s almost four times cheaper (which means I won’t have to part with my Fender, Trek and possibly 18-200 VR :-) and I’ve seen excellent examples of this lens’ superb performance in the bokes arena. Besides, it’s a light and very compact lens… however; I know for a fact I’m going to miss zooming capabilities. Anyways, I am going to keep looking, there are few other lenses I need to consider before making final decision.

Man, why can’t I have the 70-200 VR? ….. Life’s not fair :-)