Stepping up!

Yes, i'm stepping up. my gear that is, i've gone and sold all my Pentax gear (except the 'ol K10, i'll keep that for work duties) and gone and stepped up to NIKON!! :o yes, thats right, i've gone to the other side. well at least not that dark insidious side called canon! but still, going to Nikon is a great leap for someone who has used Pentax for the last 20odd years in both film and now digi formats!
  As i have mentioned before in these posts, i really struggled with sharpness and ISO issues at certain shoots eg: band/club work and model shoots. but that will all change now, (heard that before!) i have got myself the fairly new D7000 DX format camera (ie: not full frame, but crop sensor) and with that i got the pretty good Tamron 17-50 f2.8 lens to go with it as my first lens. definately a step in the right direction i think! i will be hopefully getting all pretty good gear from now on that match the camera and my shooting needs,  but a 17-50 will at least give me some fairly wide range of ways to shoot rather than get a 50-200 and cant use it for close up work. as of the last month since owning this new camera i have now become a 2nd shooter at a wedding (something i said i'd never do) and done a beach model shoot with another photographer (another thing i never did), since those 2 i gave the model group a test with the camera and was pretty happy with it (but i must say i did borrow a 70-200 f2.8 lens for that, cheers seng!) and also a band/gig shoot last sat night which i really enjoyed (mostly cause they used heaps of lights which meant i didn't struggle so much with iso/grain)
 I also found that Nikon uses NEF as there RAW (negative) file, so i had to upgrade my Lightroom (Lr) to the latest so i could edit all these pics and the fact i'm now shooting RAW AND processing them is highly unusual for me as i used to always just shoot Jpeg and use a simple free program to edit them. but now i have to get with the times and step up to what most people already use. such a big learning curve for me and it's a real struggle sometimes to get a photo to be what i perceive in my mind. but hopefully i can trowel thru it all and come out the other side with much better photos than i have previously. only time will tell!!!

so here are a few photos i've done this month with the new camera....

borrowed dave's fisheye for this one and used the K10

oh well, see how these model pics turn out!!!