I was over the moon to receive this beast of a lens in the post last week. It was loaned to me by one of our supporters, Petru, who also shoots Sony. The postage cost was astronomical, a fact I mention only to illustrate the shear girth of this lens, officially named the Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD.
We’d been discussing bird photography over on our Discord server (it’s free to join) and he’d been posting up some great shots. Up until now the only lens I own that comes close is an ancient 100-300mm Canon L lens, which I have to mount to my Sony A7C with the Sigma adaptor. With that adaptor, or maybe because it’s an old lens, the autofocus can be slow, and it’s a lens designed for SLR cameras. I still get great shots out of it, mind, but I appreciated putting on a modern lens on my modern camera with all the modern tech that comes with them.
The first thing you’ll notice about the EXIF data is that I’d left my shutter speed set to birding. There was no need to have it this fast for static images, hence the high ISO!
One of the aspects of a telezoom I love, which also becomes a hindrance, is the shallow depth of field it produces. The above shot, taken on a 50mm lens at the same aperture setting, would have got a lot more in focus, but telezooms require greater depth of field to achieve the same depth of focus.
This is evident in this image of a stitchwort flower. An aperture of f/16 or f/22 might have got both flowers in focus, but only at a push.
On this particular trip, which is covered in today’s episode, I was concentrating more on macro photography with my macro setup (a Lumix GX85 and Olympus 30mm macro lens), so I didn’t spend so much time taking photos with the Tamron. What I did use it a lot for, however, was videography. You can see some of the results in the Insects section of the episode. I was really pleased with the results it produced, where the lens excelled.
These are literally the first photos I took with the lens, so I’m hoping to go out with it again soon, this time with more consideration to my settings. I will, in due course, post up a more comprehensive article on my photography blog, so please subscribe to that for a more comprehensive update.
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