Finally, someone let me out of my cage

So I bought a new lens the other day (a Nikon 55-300 F4.5-5.6 ED VR, in case you were wondering*), and I decided to take it out on its maiden voyage yesterday with two friends. It'd been too long since I'd gone for a good drive to a new place to take some photos. Work's been crazy lately, and there just hadn't been time enough to just get out of the city for a while and do something creative and relaxing. So yesterday morning, I sporadically texted two friends and we had a spur of the moment idea to go to Mt Tambourine, which is roughly an hour south from Brisbane, and kind of west-ish from the Gold Coast. We did initially intend to go to Hinze Dam to scope it out because we'd never been there, but it happened to be closed so we weren't able to get close to it and see the dam itself. So instead, we decided to salvage the day and head on over to Mt Tambo'.


It was a good thing we did, because there were llamas** there, and a really great lookout point which I'd been to before but the cloudcover was shitty, and yesterday it was all clear blue skies with only minimal cloudcover.

The 300mm lens was great for taking pictures of the llamas, as they started out pretty shy and started a fair ways off and only crept up closer after around 25 minutes of us standing there. Also, the lens gives really nice bokeh at the wider apertures, and it really lets you isolate your subject from the background.

The lens was actually an impulse buy. A friend of mine was looking for a lens and asked me where I shopped online for them, so I showed him a site called Topbuy, which has really good deals on most of their stock. Anyway, I was flicking through the Nikon lenses when I fell across my lens. And for $315 odd (including postage) I thought it was a bit of a steal. Like a good little boy scout, I did my research first by reading a few articles and reviews on it and it seemed to hold up pretty well. And for only $300, you can't go too far wrong. Plus I've wanted a stronger telephoto for a while now, and this seemed perfect. My 200mm lens isn't redundant though, it's a bit faster and more suitable to midrange and portraiture photos, so it'll still be used a fair bit.

But, enough waffling, here's some pics.

 

Herp Derp

Not saying I'm Jesus, but...

All in all I love my new lens and what it's capable of. I had a really great time yesterday. I love going out to new places and just firing away*. Ideally it would be great to get away and do something similiar every weekend, but life doesn't always plan out, does it? I just hope I can use my camera more often, and drive around to new places just to sight see. Good times.


Clint Eastwood
Gorillaz
Gorillaz, 2001

*Which I knew you totally were
**Freakin' llamas, mad
***With my camera, not a firearm, in case the fuzz are reading this