Hey, this is Jay P. We’re down in Santa Monica. I’ve got with me the new Tamron 50-300mm f/4.5-6.3 lens. This is a great new offering from Tamron. I think this lens is a great sweet spot in that it’s great for sports. It’s great for all kinds of different walk around kind of street photography.You might even be able to throw in a little bit of landscape that’ll give you a 28mm equivalent. I’ll show you how to do that. So let’s get started. Let’s take a look at the new 50-300mm f/4.5-6.3 lens from Tamron.
So this is a six-time zoom. You go from 50mm to 300mm. So it gives you a great range. The image is very clean throughout that entire range. We’ll shoot a picture of just the sky here and we’ll show it at each of the millimeters. You can see how clean this is as you go through each of the millimeters from 50mm up to 300mm. So 50 mm is going to start out at f/4.5. As you go to about 70mm it’s going to go to f/5. As you go up a little higher to about 100mm it’s going to go to f/5.6. And then when you get up to 180mm it’s going to be around f/6.3, roughly that category. And it’ll be f/6.3 to the end to 300mm. So it does, the variation there changes as it goes up the scale, even though you start out at f/4.5 and get to f/6.3. I mean it’s not super-fast, but for a lens in this category it’s very typical. It’s what you would expect, that kind of range, unless you’re going to spend for an f/2.8 300mm, f/2.8 it’s going to be $6,000. You know, this is $799. Any lens that is going to give you a decent price it’s going to have a range of aperture that’s going to go, f/4.5 is actually a great place to start out. And then go up to f/6.3. So even at f/6.3 you can get some beautiful bokeh. We’ll do some shots of that and show you exactly what that looks like because even at f/6.3 you’re going to get some beautiful bokeh. So great range, great image quality all the way through.
When I talked about showing the image quality I said I would shoot a blue sky. So I’m going to shoot this blue sky here. And as I show it you’ll be able to see in the corners whether it’s vignetting. So I’ll start out at 50mm and I’ll slowly go up to 300mm. And just look at the corners and you can see how clean it is, whether it’s vignetting. You can see if it’s really holding the detail down on the pier below. I’m doing this at wide open. So it’s just giving us clean images to look at and just see what the image quality is like on this lens from the 50mm all the way to 300mm. Here’s those images.
So I love this kind of a lens when it comes to portraiture. It’s just so beautiful if you can get it 300mm and f/6.3 wide open and just shoot away. The background falls out of focus. You can get some decent looking bokeh. Get some beautiful background back there. So I think it’s a great, great lens. It allows you to get a little bit away from people and so you can kind of get these kind of intimate moments and they don’t really know you’re there. I love that about this lens. Here’s a gentleman just kind of looking out at the ocean. You see his tattoos, very cool. Girls from Ukraine smoking. You know, it’s just a great lens to be able to get away and shoot. I think it’s an incredible walk around lens because of that. Because of its light weight and the ability and a small compact 67mm it just becomes a small compact lens that’s easy to carry with you. It’s got a lock on the side so you can lock it so the telephoto doesn’t creep on you as far as leaving it in your bag or something. So I think it becomes an excellent walk around lens because of weight and because of size. It’s slightly bigger than the 70-300mm, but not very much and slightly heavier. When I say slightly, very slight. But it really is because of its compact weight and its range that six times zoom, it’s just an incredible portrait lens. It gives you so many options when you’re walking around. So it’s 23.5 oz and 5.9 in. So it’s a very compact form factor. It stays with that 67mm which is really nice. It makes it so you can use your other filters across all of your lenses in that Sony E-mount from Tamron. It’s made to be compact and lightweight. So it’s a beautiful lens in that way.
One thing about getting nice background falling out of focus with a lens like this, because it does do f/6.3 at 300mm, is you’ve got to choose the right place to shoot it in. Don’t get people close to backgrounds. It’s not going to work. You’re not going to get that fall off that you are going to get if you get the background back there a ways. So I’m shooting in the park, the boulevard here. I’m trying to find places where the background is way away from the person and then get on 300mm and get as far away from them as possible. You get that beautiful out of focus background. So if I do 50mm, I get in at f/4.5, I’m not going to get the background to fall out of focus very nicely. It’s got to be on that longer lens, long end of the lens. And you got to have things far away from you. You can’t have them too close to your subject matter. So that is the formula, 300mm, get back away from your person and then make sure that the background behind your person is back there a ways. Don’t put them up against a tree or some kind of bush. You’re just never going to get a very nice pleasing background. So if you want that beautiful background you got to get, the background’s got to be in there deeper, further behind them.
So this is a beautiful building, the Georgian Hotel. I don’t have, at 50mm, the ability to shoot this whole thing. So I’m going to shoot four frames. I’m going to go 1, 2, 3, 4. They stitch together so fast in Camera Raw or in Lightroom. It’s just so easy to do. So it’s going to give me the equivalent of a 28mm. It’s going to give me a nice full view up to down. It’s going to really look, give me a 28mm view. Probably not quite a 28mm, but very close. If I go up and down, major up and down, I can get 28mm out of it. But for this it’s probably going to be more like a 35mm. So I’ll shoot it in four pieces we’ll stitch together. And here it is. So that’s why I feel like this really does become a landscape lens because I’m going, I shoot a lot of times my landscapes with a 50mm because I want that flat perspective. Check out this lesson I’ve done on this before. It’ll help you understand my approach. But, so a 50mm gives me the ability to stitch to get a flat perspective. And it just looks beautiful when you stitch them together. And at that point you can get a 28mm. You can get you get a pano without any problem. So all that variety from sports and action to landscapes. There it is.
So the auto focus in this lens has been working perfectly for me. I’ve been shooting bicyclists as they come towards me. So they’re coming fast towards me. But the motor in this drive in this lens is keeping up. It’s giving me right on every single image, every single frame. It’s a VXD, which is Voice Coil eXtreme Torque Drive. All that’s just a name for, it’s a very fast drive that keeps the autofocus coming as the person drives towards me. So it works really well. So it’s really flawless. So take a look at these images as a person’s riding on their bike straight towards me.
This lens really lends itself to a person who wants a great telephoto with a great range. You want to shoot soccer, you want to shoot football, you want to shoot sports, you know, kids sports action kinds of things. It’s just reasonably priced enough that you can justify it as a lens to be able to do those kinds of things. So as an action lens is a great option because it gives you great autofocus performance. And it gives you a range that really makes sense for a lot of different sports. So in that way it’s a great lens.
So this lens comes with VC, vibration compensation, which gives you, working with the stabilization in the camera, a really beautiful stable image. I was shooting the Georgian sign back here. At 1/20th of a second with the stabilization on I can get a sharp image. With it off I cannot on 300mm. I definitely cannot. But you don’t have the ability to turn the stabilization on and off on the lens. It’s just going to turn on and off with the stabilization in the camera. And those two are going to work together to give you a stable image. Same with your video applications here. It’s going to give you that same stabilization in a video mode. And it’s going to just give you a beautiful stabilization. Let’s take a look at a piece of that. Because that VC is working so well as you saw in that piece of video, it just makes it so this does have video applications. This lens is good for doing video type work. It just gives you great stabilization as you’re using it to walk and to be able to handhold it. It gives you beautiful, beautiful stabilization. So it opens up that door.
So this lens has a very close focusing distance. At 50mm you can get about 8.7 inches from your subject matter. So that’s from your sensor to the subject. Which gets that subject very close to you. Tamron doesn’t call this a macro lens, but it really gives you macro capability. So 1:2, so half size in frame. Which gives you a pretty decent image. And it starts to give you macro capabilities. Now at 300mm it’s not near as good. At 300mm it’s more like 35.4 inches. So you’re quite a bit further away. So you don’t quite get the same macro capabilities at 300mm. But at 50mm it gives you a pretty decent macro. So as a wedding type lens, and I always say this, if you’re going to be shooting everything from portraits to rings this does give you that ability to get in very tight and give you a little bit of a macro capability. So that just expands the range of what you can do with this lens as an all-around carry it with you kind of lens. So here’s some shots of that close macro work.
So the ergonomics of this lens are really nicely done. You see this ergonomics. It started in some of the earlier lenses. The 28-75mm has it with the G2. And it’s this recessed ring right here. This recessed ring allows you to tell when you’re holding the lens exactly where everything’s at. And it fits my hand. My hand makes it to that ring when I set it in my palm. And I know I’ve got the button on my left hand side where I can change my autofocus to manual focus. So I can program that to do several things through Tamron’s Lens Utility. And then on the right hand side it’s got your lock. But it’s just that that ring allows me to intuitively know that forward is going to be my zoom and back is going to be my focus. So it just ergonomically works really well in my hand. It’s really very simple. There’s not a lot of things on it. All the vibration compensation is done through camera. You’re changing your manual focus and that is in the camera. Or you can program this button on the side. And it has the lens lock. So it’s very streamlined and lightweight. It does have the USB Type-C port on the side. So you can plug it in to be able to connect it to your lens utility, Tamron Lens Utility. Or you can do that without even having to plug it in. You can use the lens utility to update it without having to have it plugged in. So just a very simple clean kind of lens, small and lightweight. I think it’s very ergonomically easy to use and effective.
So let’s wrap this up. This really is a great all around lens, sports, action, portraits. You can get fairly close and you do some macro type work with it. It just gives you the ability to shoot so many different things. It’s lightweight. It’s got that new ergonomic kind of feel to it. So it’s really intuitive to use it. It really becomes a lens that I think falls in the same category, we love the 28-200mm. We use that all the time. This falls in that same category as that 50-300mm. It just gives you such a great range that it opens up a lot of possibilities for you. It’s got the new faster autofocus so it gives you that VXD which gives you really great autofocus response time. It gives you great stabilization in the lens and in the camera which is something that was really needed. You didn’t get it in the last version of this, the 70mm to 300mm. So this really gives you a lot of the features that moves it forward at a price of $799. I feel like this becomes in reach for your average person who wants to use it for taking pictures of their children doing sports. It’s in reach and in the category that it’s great to pick up as a secondary lens for a secondary camera if you’re doing multiple camera setups. It really becomes a lens that gives you a lot of range. So I hope you enjoyed this. Here’s some more images. You keep those cameras rollin’ and keep on clickin’.
