On a very clear but REALLY chilly afternoon Alys and I wandered down to Bosham, near Chichester in West Sussex to watch the sunset and for me to have a little bit of a go at some landscape photography.
It's a testament to the Sigma 24-70 lens that it went fairly happily from being used as a macro a week ago to being used as a landscape lens here and I think they turned out pretty well. It didn't work using a wide aperture, f2.8 looked pretty soft, but I think that's often the case when focusing a long way away. I stopped down to about f3.5-ish and they looked fine.
What I did have a play with was using RAW software to emulate a graduated filter on the lens. I don't think jpegs have the dynamic range for it to work but I shot in RAW (I always do anyway) and decided to see what I could get from these photos.
This one above have a very dark foreground so you couldn't make out any detail on the boat, the water wasn't very bright either. By darkening the sky and then brightening the whole picture it's really showing off the harbour.
I think I may have over-cooked it a bit on the one above but it shows what a RAW can do, I don't think that a jpeg would be as capable of such a change in brightness levels from the sky to the foreground (which really was very dark). It's at least two and half stops and although you probably wouldn't notice a difference here, when printed large there would certainly be some visible issues.
The last is my favourite by far though, I think the boat looks brilliant and the whole image looks right for Bosham.

All in, it was a good day out for the Alpha 700 and the Sigma, this sort of shot would have been improved with a wide angle lens such as the Sigma 10-20mm which could have given the scene a bit more impact but I think my wedding faithful did well.