In The Garden After The Rain (With my new favorite lens)

Photographic opportunities have been few and far between recently, what with the deplorable irish weather, and also with a heavy workload in my day job as a designer. I had hoped to have had more time to try out my new lenses and my D700 but the light has been abysmal lately. Still, I did find myself in interesting surroundings the other day, and at just the right time. I was in my brother's house in the country and he has what can only be described as a spectacular garden. There had been some torrential showers of rain and between showers I managed to get out and take some images of the various flowers and plants, freshly covered with rain drops and in a nice overcast soft light.

These were all taken with my Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 OS and I have to say i'm really happy with how the lens is turning out. The pictures it produces are beautiful and velvety and smooth, while being pin sharp where you need it. I'm sure its Nikon counterpart probably is better, but I can't really fault the images I'm getting from it, especially of nature and landscape subjects.

Here's a couple more. They're quite dark, but I was trying to capture the moody look of the day. I certainly could have upped the exposure or brought them up in post production, but they look really nice when you see them large on a monitor.

I'm really loving the way the D700 handles green. I always had an issue with Canon's rendition of green subjects. You usually had to take the yellow out of it as everything was always slightly off colour wise, but on the D700 I've found that you barely have to touch the RAW files. Most of these were straight conversions in Lightroom, using either the Vivid or Standard camera profile.