and now we're going to sit here and wait and hope for some wildlife to come by
nothing yet so we're going to climb to the top of that mountain there and see what we can find
because there's some great great landscape back behind that area if i did find
i did find a wild alaskan in his native habitat here
so he provided some subject material for for me to shoot with this lens
so
i will say as a landscape that lens this lens is really nice if you want to isolate
a subject really isolated against the backdrop the other thing that's fantastic about this lens
is that the macro capability or the near macro capability of it is
really really good you can get really close to something and take a really nice picture which is
actually i found some really cool stuff to take some macro shots up here um another thing to
consider though is if you're backpacking like like i am seven eight nine miles 10 miles 15
miles into the wilderness it's a heavy lens to backpack with it comes in at about four pounds
which is not bad lightweight sort of lightweight but uh it is something to consider if you're
gonna put four extra pounds for one lens in your backpack you really want to make sure that you
know it's going to be worth it now unfortunately even though we've been waiting up here and
spending a couple of days out here we haven't seen very much wildlife i was hoping to see some
caribou or some wolves we saw lots of evidence of them but actually did not see any of them but i do
know of a place where we will definitely see some wildlife and that's where we're going to go next
so we came to this beach nice little area here uh out in prince william sound and there's an eagle
up in the trees behind us here that we're gonna try and get some photos of with the a1 and the
tamron 150 to 500 which is a great combination because you have this fantastic autofocus for
the a1 and then 50 megapixels to work with so you don't actually have to get that close
and now we're going to move on and see if we can find some other wildlife to shoot
and film from while i'm in the kayak which is a huge challenge because everything's
moving all of the time and it does kind of limit the focal length i can use unless i
ramp my shutter speed up to like two thousand it just is hard to get very sharp pictures
but even at 350 400 or so i've been able to get some pretty good pictures from the kayak
of some of the sea life in the area and some other stuff around us as we go
this lens is obviously a great choice for wildlife a great choice for extreme close-ups
extreme distances but there was one more way i wanted to test this before putting
this video together and that's in one of the most challenging environments
possible
so
me
if you've never had the opportunity to shoot air to air it's an extreme challenge for everything
because everything's moving at 100 miles an hour and everything in the airplane including yourself
is vibrating so it's an extreme challenge for vibration optical image stabilization and a
body stabilization to which i found the tamron responded really well now it didn't do grayed out
at longer focal lengths but i've never had good luck with lenses out at longer focal lengths but
it did do really well and i was even finally able to get the full prop disc which means my shutter
speed had to be about 180th or maybe a hundredth to be able to get that full prop disc because you
want to blur the prop it's a real challenge to get that and get the airplane sharp as you're
flying along at 100 miles an hour and everything is moving around you now most of the shots i
took while i was up there while we were flying around between these two airplanes
turned out great i did miss quite a few that's pretty normal i usually only get maybe 20 percent
usable shots from anything i ever do air to air and that's just part of the way you're trying to
shoot with a slower shutter speed and also um your everything's moving and changing the dynamics the
lighting everything is changing really fast but the tamron did really well all in all tamron's
created an excellent lens for wildlife for any extreme telephoto stuff it handles it really
well the autofocus is excellent it's extremely fast being that it's such a long focal length
and so accurate and on that one thing you will get used to using quite a bit is the switch that
goes from full to three meters to infinity and 15 meters to infinity especially if you're shooting
through a lot of objects you want to be able to put that switch in the the area the range
that it's going to get you the most usable footage when set properly the autofocus worked really well
and very quickly on any a7 a1 a9 series body that i tried this cam this lens out with the sharpness
of this lens edge to edge overall is excellent the image performance the optical performance of it is
really really good i'm not going to great depth in great detail there because a lot of people
have already covered that but i will say that in use this lens has performed really really
well and i'm very very excited to to add one to my lens collection it's an excellent lens for
wildlife it's an excellent lens for anything that you're going to do with the extreme photography
or even videography especially for setting it on a tripod and you really want the reach to be able
to punch way in at events or somewhere where you're going to be a ways away from something
this lens is a fantastic performer there are a couple of reasons that i would pick this
lens over some of the comparable lenses one is price this is fourteen hundred dollars maybe
the comparable lenses are quite a bit more than that the performance for fourteen hundred dollars
is fantastic you just get some spectacular images out of it the construction quality is excellent
i put this one through a lot of abuse a lot of hiking a lot of kayak trips a lot of in and out of
small airplanes and it withheld or withstood a lot of abuse really well not surprising considering
all of my other tamron lenses have withstood a serious amount of abuse here in alaska as well
it feels great in your hands balance as well with a camera body especially if you two-handed holding
the camera body and the lens zooming out even to 500 millimeters it doesn't feel like it gets
terribly front heavy like some other lenses i've used do this just is a really fantastic
great performing lens for anybody who's looking to really get serious about some wildlife photography
or airplane air to air stuff even ground to air stuff this lens is a fantastic performer and one
of the things that surprised me was how much i enjoyed using this lens for landscapes here you
can see a shot but this isn't a landscape but you can see a shot of the moon i took
this is in sunlight the moon looks really great you can zoom way in and see a lot of great detail
and this was handheld me just holding it up pointing at the moon and snapping a photo uh
but i really enjoyed this for landscapes because being able to really punch in and
isolate just what i wanted like this mountain with the clouds coming off the back side of
it or some of these mountain peaks here it just really enables you to get a much better framing
of a subject in landscape than you would without a really telephoto lens now i've used a 70 to 180 my
tamron 70 to 180 for landscapes a lot i love that for landscapes it does a phenomenal job
but this really enables you to go a lot further and be able to capture and isolate a subject in a
landscape a lot more which is really great i know a lot of people take these lens collars off this
has got an arca swiss compatible plate and i know a lot of people take these collars off but this
actually was really nice because i was able to hold it and get a good tight grip around it when
i was shooting out the window of the airplane and if you've never shot out the window of an airplane
when it's going 100 miles an hour it's really nice to know that you've got a really good firm grip
and grasp of your camera gear because if you let go it's very light very likely you won't get it
back and the vibration compensation the lens based stabilization in this coupled with a body that has
embody image stabilization does a great job maybe not quite as good as other lenses out there but i
would say this is 95 percent maybe 98 of the way there and it works really well you've got
the three different modes mode one is kind of your standard basic all-around mode stabilizing
pretty much every direction mode two is specific for panning so if you're panning left to right
the compensation the vibration the optical image stabilization won't fight you as you move
left to right but it will give you good stable footage again or good stable shots this is handy
especially if you're trying to shoot birds in flight or airplanes in flight and then mode three
is where it will kind of try and lock whatever your framing is as soon as you push the shutter
button so that's useful especially if you're hand holding and you're shooting something that's quite
a ways off an eagle in a tree something like that that's a great use for mode three because it kind
of locks the image stabilization not locks it down to where it doesn't move but it tries to
hold the framing that you've got as you push the shutter button and keep that throughout the
as the photos being taken if you want to see other lenses that are fantastic for sony cameras a lot
of them are tamron click or tap right there some small playlist i'll see in one of those videos
as always if you have questions join me on my live stream wednesday nights 4 p.m alaska time
8 pm eastern or let me know in the comments below i will see you again soon in the next video cheers