Ok, so I said there would be another post about this Nikkor 105 VR and this is it.  Remember that shot I had of the western fence lizard from the last post?  Well here is another from that day.

I did have great time shooting this little guy.  For some reason he just wanted to chill out on the rock and let me photograph him, so I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity.  I put the 105 to work shooting away and got a lot of keepers from this guy, but what I like the most was when I was looking at the images in post an blew up this image to 100%.  The result of that is below.

This is a cropped shot at 100% of the image above, with nothing done to it in post.  I could not believe how sharp this lens is, and might I add this was handheld as well.  That’s right folks, no tripods here spooking the little guy away, just me the camera and the VR all working together to make a fun shot.

Captured with D700 105f2.8 Micro on Lexar digital film

So my good friend Kevin let me borrow his Nikkor 105 VR Micro lens to try out while mine is on the way from my buddies at Adorama.  So I took it out for spin for a bit and caught so fun stuff.  I have to say I like this lens a lot!!

First up was some Indian Paintbrush the reds were popping.

Some Purple Lupine

And I was even abel to catch a little wildlife.  Here I caught this western fence lizard sunbathing on a rock.  There is another post to follow on this little guy.

Captured with Nikon D700 105f2.8 on Lexar digital film

So this is a shot back from when I was in New Mexico in January that never made it onto the blog back then.  But since I am getting ready to head that way again on my way to my buddy Jeff Lynch’s Texas Landscape Safari next week, I decided to go back through some images to see if there were places I wanted to go revisit.  I found this image in the archives and realized that I had done nothing with it at this point.  So I started playing around and decided on a solution to make a neat image.

So first off I decided to start this out as a 1 shot HDR editing the image in Photomatix 3.1, and got what you see below:

So it is overdriven and has some funky halos and blues going on not to mention a TON of noise that got introduced in the process.  So I went from here, convert the layer into a Smart Object and started the real work.

Step 1 was to drop the image in Nik’s Dfine 2.0 to axe the noise from the image.

Step 2 was to go into Nik’s Silver Efex Pro and finish the image how I wanted.  Up top is the final result.

Enjoy and have a great weekend.

At 8am PST Adobe is going to announce CS5 and all of its wonder and where is the best best to learn every nook an cranny of what is to come?  Well look no further becasue the guys over at NAPP have got a whole site that will launch at the end of Adobe’s presentation tomorrow packed with great info on CS5.  For a full break down head over to Scott Kelby’s blog for a breakdown.  Tomorrow is going to be a busy day…

I have added a link in the Educational Section on the left entitled PSU CS5 that will take you right to the site.

Enjoy

So I promised something was going to be announced on the site… and yes I know you all know that Sharpen Pro 3.0 has been out for a while.  However, you may not have known that I was working on an addendum chapter for the book that discusses some ways to use SHP 3.0.  And now you can download it FREE from Wiley right here.  The chapter covers the basics of SHP 3.0 and was written with the fact that the user interface is the same as the other great programs from Nik so I cut out that part and added a lesson on using Display sharpening for all of us bloggers out on the web.

Also, just as another goody for all the readers out there in case you didn’t know Nik Software has a site up so that you can download styles for Silver Efex Pro 1.0.  If you didn’t know it existed, now you do.  You can head over there by clicking this link.  There are a lot a great styles on there.
Enjoy…