The Race!

Summer returned today and so I took myself, a towel and just the Nikkor 18-200mm VR zoom to lap up some rays, down at Bournemouth earlier today.

I don't take pics of people on the beach and whilst I'm on it myself the camera never appears - sand kills cameras and a bloke on his own on a crowded beach with a big DSLR is quite rightly not to be welcomed.

I got a few shots from the promenade, afterwards, mostly of the interesting people walking about on it or sitting at the café tables. Café being a slightly over optimistic term...

Not many in the sea and so when I saw these two - mother/daughter? - run in I rather automatically clicked away. The encircling birds seagulls so epitomised the seaside too, for me. It's just a nice image and doesn't show anybody in a bad way, so it is my Blip today.

When I've been using good quality, modest-ranging standard zooms almost all the time, which have very little noticeable distortion, using the huge wide-range 18-200mm instead showed up its comparatively huge distortion. This, shot at 200mm had such a dip in the middle of the sea's horizon that I stood out a mile. With street portraits and carnivals and such that I use it for this affects the image little, here it looked awful.

This pincushion was fully corrected, easily and efficiently in Photoshop but it does remind that these super zooms do come with some cost. This Nikon remains one of the very few, if only decent-enough performing zooms of such a range, for Nikon DX users. That it can get a satisfactory standard of sharpness wide open at its long end is testament to what can be designed these days. This final image was cropped a little on the right and sharpened a bit as well. It remains a good lens despite having been superseded by a Mk2, which only is improved by a more advanced VR and a zoom lock and now secondhand is quite affordable and a much better bet than buying the equivalent Sigma/Tamron brand new.

And on such days it does show how useful such a lens is and why they are so popular.

If it doesn't cloud over too much, I think a moon long exposure at midnight for you all for tomorrow's Blip - as you've all been so nice to me recently!