If anyone suffered retinal damage from the two previous, intensely-colorful posts, I’ll offer a couple of soothing, nearly-colorless images today. We’ve been getting some snow lately and yesterday morning there was also a light fog so I thought it might be a good time to get out and do some testing of the new equipment. The shot above was made with the full-frame Nikon D700 and the Nikkor 17-35 at 35mm. I’ll try not to keep saying this but it is soooo nice to have that lens back as it was intended. The cropped factor of the previous Nikon bodies reduced the 17mm end to the equivalent of a 25 — not nearly as fun and a real loss when it came to interior work.

This shot is from the D300 with the 24-120 kit lens that came with the 700. This will be my first lens with vibration reduction so it will be interesting to see how it fares. The image above was made at the long end of the zoom at 120mm, roughly equivalent to 180mm since it was on the cropped-sensor body. I’m looking forward to having a full-frame and cropped-sensor body as it really expands the range of the lenses I carry. I imagine I’ll keep a wide on the D700 most of the time and take advantage of the crop factor on the D300 to get that extra telephoto reach.