Quail Gardens - again

I visited Quail Gardens in Encinitas (click for slideshow) with a friend to show her the Gardens and get her out shooting. Even though I visited the Gardens only a few days ago, it was a great outing with a lot of fun and nice shooting. One reason it was a pleasure was of course trying out my new D300 and the lenses. Both the Nikon 70-300 VR and the Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 are great lenses. I guess the main subject for this shooting was the big frogs in the pond at the Gardens. Cool guys making a lot of noise and fighting about who's the boss.
I played a bit with the WB settings in the post processing in the waterfall shots that I think made them look interesting. I've said it before and I say it again, it's almost as fun doing the post processing as the actual shooting, especially when using Lightroom. I've recently began using Capture NX, which came with my D300. I must say that it is a very strong competitor to Photoshop. Easy and fun to work with. I'm also looking forward to trying the Lightroom 2.0 Beta that is out now. It has some really cool features, similar to the Capture NX local changes in an image.