If you'll excuse the bad pun, I'm starting to get a handel on this new lens. If you didn't walk away in disgust from that, keep reading. No more bad jokes, promise.

Shooting water is popular with a lot of photographers, and it's easy to see why. Water is one of those subjects which really lets you experiment with your camera. Shutter speed is the most obvious candidate for experimentation, and that's what I was doing. I went to a park on the way to work, and as I've been trying to do, I didn't go there with a particular plan. I walked around for a while, not shooting anything, then I came across the fountain there. It was a beautiful day but quite windy, so the water from the fountain was blowing around a lot. Perfect for some high/low shutter speed shots.

Oh yeah, a caveat: if your camera's not weather sealed, trying to get shots like this is a good way to wreck it. 

Started off high-ish: 1/1600

Then really high : 1/5000

Then it was time to go in the other direction. Like a lot of people, I really like the "silky" effect you can get with water if you slow the shutter speed right down. So I shut the lens (the 70-300) down to its highest f-stop (36, I think), put the ISO down to the lowest level, and stuck a 4-step ND filter on front of it. Gave me a reading of around 1 second depending on how I angled it. This is what resulted:

Nice, but not as silky as I would have liked (I really wanted to go lower with the shutter speed, but it was a bright day). Might have to invest in the strongest possible ND filter at some time.

Later on in the evening I was on the way back from work and chanced upon three guys playing some pretty impressive jam music. The D3 is a great camera in low light, and I love shooting street music, so this was a chance I couldn't miss. These shots were all at ISO 4000.

A lot of street shots seem nicer in black and white for some reason. My take on colour vs b/w is that if the colour is a major part of the photograph then leave it in, but if the content or something other than the colour is the main point of the photograph then you should experiment with black and white settings as well. Sometimes a shot will just look better one way or the other. 

For instance, the guitarist was wearing a white top, and when compared to the original RAW file, the b/w looked waaaay better:

Whereas the bassist was sporting a screaming lime green t-shirt, which just begged to be displayed in colour:

I don't know who these guys were, but they were really good. 

Thanks as always for reading, feel free to leave comments, etc.