Looking through the bridge

I had quite an intense weekend photographically.  It started on Friday night at a Coca Cola event in Malahide at which my sister’s electric string quartet, Siren, were playing a 15 minute set and ended with me taking photographs at my brother-in-law’s rugby match yesterday – more on both of those later this week.  In between, having dropped Úna to the ferry at Dublin Port, I spent 30 minutes on the Samuel Beckett bridge playing with some new toys.

The bridge itself is a bit of a new toy for photographers in Dublin and, as a magnificent piece of architecture and engineering, I suspect it will be one of the more photographed sites in Dublin this year.  My new toys, which I took to the bridge to try out in earnest for the first time, were a Nikon D700 and a Nikon 24-70mm lens, both of which I purchased on Saturday.  I am now a full frame photographer, and using the dream lens that was at the top of my wishlist for a long time.  I’ve taken about 340 shots with it since I got it – a mix of architecture, landscape, detail and sports so far – I’ll get to put it through its wedding and portrait paces next Saturday – and so far I love it.

I had used a D700 for a couple of weeks late last year around Catherine and Dean’s wedding and loved it then too – the viewfinder is astounding (topped only by the D3/s/x range, but a huge leap from the D300), and the high ISO capabilities of the sensor outperform the D300 by two stops.  As my father-in-law remarked yesterday the D300 itself is a great camera, so for the D700 to improve on that says a lot about it.

That two weeks when I used it in December I was shooting with a 24-70mm Sigma lens.  The barrier to entry to the world of full frame cameras is the need to have full frame lenses.  Most of mine are optimized for the DX sensor of the D300, apart from my 50mm, and my plan was to use that on my new D700.  However a keenly priced 24-70mm Nikon came my way and it was, I suppose, an offer too good to refuse.  First impressions are that it lives up to the hype as Nikon’s best zoom lens – it is simply stunning.  Even on the LCD screen you can see an improved clarity and sharpness over the Tamron 17-50mm lens I previously shot with (and again it, I thought, was a super lens) and when you look at the photos on the laptop the detail jumps out.  I can’t wait to see some of them in print.

This photo was captured on the Samuel Beckett bridge using my new Nikon purchases.  I’ll post again about the bridge later this week also, as it is photographically challenging, but as I quickly went through the batch of photos last night this one stood out as a keeper.  I used a port hole (for want of a better word) in the structure of the bridge to frame the stretch of quay that runs from it along the south side of the Liffey, with the iconic Ringsend towers and some of the cranes of the port in the distance.  I love the colour in this shot – probably more the camera’s doing than the lenses – and even at a relatively wide aperture of f/5.6 (I was watching the shutter speed and wanted to keep at ISO 800 for this set of photos for test purposes) there is a good deal of clarity in the detail the full length of the quay.

340 photos down with my new camera and lens.  Many many thousands to go.