People continue to amaze me

At the risk of losing some of my loyal readers, I am posting even more photos of our dog, George. There’s a reason to my madness, so bear with me here.

I have a friend who is a co-worker at my school. We hired him several years ago to teach the French language to our students. He is the most affable person, and is loved by everyone. He was born and raised on the Ivory Coast and was actually in the Olympics years ago! He also coaches our Cross Country and Girls Varsity Soccer teams.

He is interested in photography and when I showed him my blog earlier this year, he said (in his French accent) something along the lines of “Sacre Bleu! Mon Dieux!” and lots of other things that I couldn’t understand. But he looked happy. And he looked interested.

Sometimes he comes to the office and speaks completely in French to me and for some strange reason, my four years of high school French can comprehend some of what he’s saying. This pleases him no end.

Because he has seen my Flickr account and those of others, he is now REALLY interested in photography and has taken it up with a passion. He recently purchased a Nikon D90 which came with a kit lens that’s really nice. But he wanted a good zoom lens, too. So he just bought the Nikon 70-300mm with VR and offered it to me to ‘borrow’ for a week or so.

I tried to turn him down. I even offered him my macro lens to fool around with. I am not quite sure what he was saying, but the next thing I know was that a Nikon zoom lens was being put into my hands and wow ~ it was heavier than I expected.

All of the photos you see here were taken today by my husband, on full auto mode. I brought the lens home yesterday but I couldn’t get it to focus when it was fully extended to 300mm and I was so nervous to have anything happen to it that I gave up.

But when I came home today and looked on the memory card, I immediately asked my husband which lens he had used today and he told me it was the borrowed one. And I said “wow”. Or maybe I said, “Sacre Bleu” or “Mon Dieux”. I don’t remember.

I just think that these photos are so much crisper and they make me happy! I mean, I’m not going to rush out and buy a new lens this weekend or anything. I just wanted to show you the difference between this and the Quantaray. I didn’t sharpen any of the photos here at all (I tend not to sharpen much anyway) and aside from using a slight boost from Pioneer Woman (slight, mind you) well, that’s about all I did here.

I love the one of the blue jay, and the finch is quite crisp as well. But I absolutely love the nose and tongue photo. I think it’s just such a nice shot.

I’d like to introduce you now to my friend and co-worker, Avognan.

Merci, moni ami!

Je tiens a vous remercier pour l’utilsation de votre appareil photo. Je suis heureux que vous appreciez de prendre des photos!

(And I am sorry but I can’t make the little marks above the letters.)

Thanks to everyone for stopping by, for your encouragement, your support and always your kind and funny comments. You make my day, every day.

Love,