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| Tundra Swans; Cropped from 36mp to 5.1mp (click to enlarge) |
I didn't yet have time to pick out several of my best images and work on them extensively to try to extract more detail and micro-contrast. From Monday's image of the landing bald eagle, I know I can bring out some additional detail that the lens (newly released Tamron 150-600mm) should have natively captured with ease. But, each image will take time and care by using plug-ins, etc. I would anticipate each image taking ten or more minutes to edit. That is not something to which I look forward. That much time shouldn't be necessary, but the copy of the lens I had was sub par, in my opinion. As I stated before, I can't make a blanket statement that all of these lenses are not very good since I only had one copy.
I will post some additional images on Friday.
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| Bald Eagle "hunting" in a salt water marsh (click to enlarge) He was really far away, even using a 600mm lens This was severely cropped to 1.3mp! |
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| (click to enlarge) |
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| Cormorant (click to enlarge) |
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| Just before sunset, Canada geese find a place to roost in the tall marsh grass in the NWR (click to enlarge) |
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| As I was leaving Assateague Island, I stopped on the bridge over the channel between Assateague and Chincoteague to make this image from my driver's seat. (click to enlarge) |
Thanks for looking. Enjoy!
Dennis Mook
Many of my images can be found at www.dennismook.com. Please pay it a visit. I add new images regularly. Thank you.
All content on this blog is © 2014 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or image.
Dennis--
ReplyDeleteIn the shots of the Bald Eagle (the "hunting" shot here and the wonderful opening shot of your previous post), many of the grass blades in the (naturally) out of focus background appear to be doubled, as if the grass grew in twins. (This doubling is more widespread in the flying shot. Here, it appears especially in the tuft behind and to our right of the eagle.) I have almost no experience with lenses this long. Is this doubling an effect of long focal length or of this particular unsatisfactory copy of the Tamron?
In any case, I hope your detailing software can make up for the lens's deficiencies. That shot of the Tundra Swans at the top of this post is particularly splendid. Clearly the photographer did his job, framing and timing it perfectly, and the models did theirs as well--perfectly out of sync!
Thanks!
Walter Foreman
namerof@uky.edu
Walter, I saw that phenomenon in many of my images. I've been thinking about why things are doubled, even when the tripod is locked down and the image stabilization is turned off. Sometimes it was there and sometimes not, even when carefully manually focused. And–I'm still very good at manually focusing accurately. At first I thought that I had not focused the lens correctly or there was camera movement, thus making a double image. But, even locked down on a heavy duty tripod and shot at over 1/1000th second, I still saw that double imaging.
DeleteI'm now thinking that either the out of focus areas are truly rendered in this fashion (double imaging), which is very unattractive to me, or there is a loose element in the lens that slightly moves. That may explain the sometimes sharp images, sometimes out of focus images, sometimes sharply focused images with loss of fine details, inability to calibrate it with the FoCal software and possibly these renderings of a double image. What do you think?
Dennis
Dennis—
Delete(This is my third attempt to respond. My first two got eaten. Fortunately, the second time I saved screenshots as I went along so I can just copy this. My apologies if I'm just talking about things you already know.)
I have looked ahead at the next post, with the Olympus shots, and in one place I think I see the doubling, though I would never have noticed it if I hadn't been sensitized to the effect by certain of the Tamron shots. (I think I see it in the first picture of the egret, the one where it is standing straight up, in the bright area at the top of the frame above and to the left of its bill.) So naturally, adapting to the modern age, I googled "bokeh double lines," and it turns out that this is a known phenomena in bokeh circles (bad joke). See, for example, the article at http://hobbymaker.narod.ru/English/Articles/bokeh_eng.htm. What appears to be the classic account in English from 1997 is reproduced at http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/bokeh.shtml. I haven't fully read either, but the first (a translation from Russian) attributes the double-line effect, called ni-sen bokeh in Japanese, to overcorrection for chromatic aberration. According to this article, the ART of lens making involves knowing how to compromise between in-focus sharpness and pleasing out-of-focus areas. So it appears that the Olympus set-up exhibits this artistry and your copy of the Tamron did not, whether from clumsy design (which wouldn't explain the good reviews you mention) or from clumsy assembly of your particular lens, with some looseness of an element or of the focusing mechanism leading to that ghastly inconsistency. (By the way, did you tell Borrowlenses.com, whose service you praise, about their questionable lens?)
So I think you're right: the focusing inconsistency of the Tamron included a tendency to render bokeh badly.
But not always: in the cormorant picture above the out-of-focus background to the very in-focus bird beautifully shows the bird's plumage matching its environment in color and mottled pattern (an expert fish-hunter's camo?), yet it stands out in your photograph by virtue of the differences in lighting and focus!
Walt
Dennis--
DeleteP.S. And I guess long lenses would exaggerate the effect . . .
Walt
Walt, I went back into Lightroom and looked at that upright standing egret at 100%. I really didn't see the doubling, but more or less a "spreading" into softness. As you said, probably a function of lens design. That older 4/3 Olympus lens costs about as much as the brand new Tamron, but the older Olympus is much faster. In my opinion, after using both lenses, the Olympus lens is a much better lens.
DeleteI called Borrowlenses.com yesterday to give them a heads up about the lens and advised they might want to check it before sending to someone else. I got the feeling that the young man who answered the telephone wasn't giving my comments much credence until I started telling him about my 45 years experience, trying to calibrate the lens with FoCal and then going through procedures to eliminate other variables and try to identify the problem. He seemed to then think I may know what I was doing. The exchange amused me, somewhat!
Dennis