Funny how digital photography can make you do stuff. I'm just goofing around in Lightroom 2.2 R2, and suddenly I find myself turning some bright and nice clouds into something dark.

Ok, so here's the scenario. I have a standard frame of some clouds shot this summer. I'm just testing the latest version of Lightroom and I start to adjust some sliders, basically checking for errors and working my way around the application, I am a beta tester after all you know.

After a while things where starting to look interesting, now I'm on a misson. I'm in a dark mood at the moment, so this is right up my alley. What I ended up with was this image that looks like it's shot during a dark night with some moonlight coming in from behind the clouds creating nice God rays. In reality it's the sun shining through the clouds in an evening of June 2008. I like the result, it has some qualities I really like.

Captured with a D2Xs and AF-S 70-200mm f2.8 and 1.7x tele converter. Written to SanDisk Extreme IV Ducati Edition compact flash card.

I'm no fan of the darkest months of the year, but it sure is uplifting to come across these types of scenes. Probably the only time of the year that one could encounter such conditions.

So I was quick to jump out of the car and shot some frames of this splendid display of colour right beside the runway on the local airport.

Captured with a D700 and AF-S 24-70mm f2.8 lens. Written to SanDisk Extreme IV Ducati Edition compact flash card.

Yesterday turned out to be quite an eventful day. And today started more or less where yesterday left off, so earlier today I went out and bought a Nikkor 24-70 ƒ2.8G ED lens, would you believe.

So now it was time to test this thing, the D700 and the 24-70mm together. So I've configured my D700 to shoot 14bit RAW files, and the time of day being close to sunset I thought it would give me a chance to test how this lens and the D700 RAW files would perform. Well, to say the least I'm shocked at how good this 14bit RAW thingy on the D700 is.

In my original shot the darkest areas are almost black, the values Lightroom  reported for the RGB channels where 0.1%, 0.0% and 0.0%; that is black in my book. So I thought, I can't possibly restore these values considering my experience with earlier cameras from Nikon, this was a throw-away image.

Well, not quite so at all. I started to adjust the image in Lightroom 2 (currently 2.2 Release 1), and I'm baffled that I was able to restore the RGB values to something that the human eye actually can see. But enough talk, I got picture evidence to prove it.

The first image below is the un-touched RAW file as how it exports from Lightroom.

Below is the corrected image. Note that I've just used the tools in Lightroom 2 to achieve this result, no HDR or tricks like that. Plain and simple adjustments in Lightroom 2.

Well, what can I say, I think it is quite remarkable to achieve this kind of results. This is just one RAW file, I conclude that the 14bit NEF can achieve miracles!, well, kinda. At least compared to the earlier cameras this is a miracle in my mind. I'm sure that my D2Xs would not be able to pull this off. So it is time to sell the D2Xs and get a second D700, or even a D3, ah well.

And we can go kinda over the top also with the colours, and do some cloning on some areas of the picture, and then we have this. Quite extreme, maybe, but the NEF files sure can take a beating.

Captured with a D700 and AF-S 24-70mm f2.8 lens. Written to SanDisk Extreme IV Ducati Edition compact flash card.

Finally, after a bumpy road getting the D3, I have now ended up with a Nikon D700. What can I say, just after a few minutes playing with this thing I'm totally in love with it. Never have I seen such crisp and clean images from a digital SLR. To be able to shoot using ISO 3200 and 6400, with hardly any noise at all, is, really quite something and a totally new experience. This truly is available darkness as the viral marketing machine would have us believe, well, they were right all along.

I had really landed on a D3, it was sitting firmly in my shopping cart, but as faith should have it, it didn't really go so well in the end. Someone had messed up the delivery, and someone was talking to someone that didn't listen, a week went by and no D3, so fast forward to today and I'm a lucky owner of a Nikon D700, it went fast too, all it took was a quick phone call to my local dealer who had a D700 waiting on the shelf just for me, a swift swipe with the VISA, and viola, lucky me!

And I'm happy indeed, not only is it a 'mini' D3, it is also more agile than a D3, and makes for a more stealthy shooting experience when doing street photography. I have mounted the Nikkor 14-24mm ƒ2.8 on the D700, and I must say, this combination is really nice. The 14-24 balances very well on the D700.

Hello crazy-wide-heaven!

As you may have noticed, I have a new design on my blog. It is the minimalistic RocketTheme template MediaMogul Essentials. I've made some adjustements to the CSS to better suit my vision of the design I wanted. I've tuned the colours a bit, removed some borders here and there and cleaned up some of the list styles.

I also use some rounded border styles in the design, so for the best look I encourage you to use Firefox 3, Google Chrome or Safari 3.