Wildlife Photography Weekend; Renting a Lens and Comment on the Tamron 150-600mm Lens I Rented

Bald Eagle making a water landing in Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, Virginia (click to enlarge)
I had to work hard to bring out the detail in the bird, but shouldn't have had to.

I made it back home Sunday evening from a very nice weekend of photographing mostly waterfowl on the Eastern Shore of Virginia.  The best part of my time away was spending the weekend with some very good photographer friends as well as the food in some of the local restaurants.  This was the eighth time I made this particular trip with these particular friends.  We always have a good time!

For this trip, I did something I hadn't done before.  That is, since I am not primarily a wildlife photographer, I rented a lens conducive to wildlife photography from Borrowlenses.com.  I rented the new Tamron 150-600 f/5-6.3 VC zoom lens.  This lens was introduced several months ago, and since it received some pretty good reviews, I thought I would rent a copy to allow me to extend my telephoto reach to bring in distant birds closer than with lenses I own.

I have two comments.  the first about the lens rental process and the second about the lens itself.

First, renting a lens from Borrowlenses.com was painless, affordable, easy to do and a very good process.  I would do it again if I need another specialty lens that I don't own.  I can recommend using them for your lens rental needs.  I have not tried any others, but may in the future to compare the process.

Second, about the Tamron lens.  I don't know if I got a relatively poor copy of the lens, or the lens is not up to what I consider a good to excellent performer.  I was pretty disappointed in the results I had with the lens.  Here is the story.  Read on.

The lens actually arrived Tuesday evening by FedEx.  I ordered it a day early to ensure that it was properly working.  When I opened the well padded box, the lens appeared brand new.  That was reassuring. After making a few exposures and checking the focusing mechanism for proper working condition, I wanted to use my FoCal software to calibrate this particular lens to my particular camera body.  I planned on taking my Nikon D810 so that is the body to which I would calibrate the lens.  At extreme telephoto magnifications, it is easy to have images that are slightly out of focus unless the lens and camera are working well together.  Well, that was my first problem.

I set up my usual test procedure with the target and, because of the focal length utilized, set the target about 13 meters away.  The camera is locked down on a tripod perfectly level while the target is at a distance perfectly plumb.  You would want the sensor in the camera to be perfectly parallel to the target.

The target is a file you print at a specific size and comes with the software.  It contains a variety of specific lines and graphic images, etc. that the software knows how to read. I decided to calibrate the lens at 500mm as I would be primarily be photographing migrating waterfowl and I would be using the lens at 500 to 600mm most of the time.  I didn't calibrate it at 600mm as typically the longest focal length of a zoom lens is not quite as good as the shorter focal lengths in zoom lenses.

As I said, I set up my normal system for calibration but the lens would not focus consistently accurately so the software could not tell me at which AF fine tune setting was optimum. Unbelievable!  I tried going through the entire procedure twice but the lens would front focus then back focus then correctly focus at each of the different AF fine tuning settings.

The software runs the test from an AF fine tuning setting of -20 all the way to a +20 setting.  At each setting, it focuses, then defocuses the lens then makes an exposure several times to achieve the greatest contrast and resolution on the test chart.  If the lens does not consistently focus in the same place, the software can't really tell you at which AF fine tune setting your camera and lens performs best.

I will discount that there is an issue with my camera body as the focusing calibration and subsequent images made with each of my Nikon lenses were excellent in resolution and sharpness.  So, it had to be the lens.

I then tried to use the software's ability to determine optimum aperture, but that also would not work since optimum aperture depends upon accurate focus.  What to do?  I was leaving for the trip the next day.

Then, using the same setup, I took a sheet of instructions with very small print that I had in my garage.  I taped them onto the front of the target and then manually went through the entire AF fine tune range to try to, again, ascertain which setting was the best focus.  Again, I could clearly see that the lens was not consistently focusing in the same place.  I did my best and set the lens to -4.  I could only hope it was close to correct.

Winter Dunes, Cape Charles, Eastern Shore, Virginia (click to enlarge)

Off to the Eastern Shore Thursday morning.  I first stopped at the Eastern Shore National Wildlife Refuge but saw no wildlife.  Then onto Cape Charles where I always enjoy photographing the winter dunes and snow fences on their beach on the Chesapeake Bay.  For these images, I used my Nikon 24-120mm f/4 G VR lens.  Tack sharp.  See the image above.

As I like to make the most of my wandering, I stay off the main road and prowl the back roads looking for interesting images before arriving at my destination, the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge.

After arriving at Chincoteague, I met up with some of our group and started to look for images of primarily migrating waterfowl.  As it was the past few years, they were scarce.  There were some tundra swans, great blue herons, egrets, ibises, two bald eagles, Canada geese and a variety of ducks. We were hoping to see thousands of snow geese as they migrated south, but evidently, they are still north.

As far as the lens goes, as I made images, I checked them at 100% on the camera's LCD, then subsequently on my 15" laptop after importing them into Lightroom.  I was not happy with the first day's images as they seemed slightly out of focus.  Back to square one.

On Friday, I experimented with the AF fine tune setting and, instead of a setting of -4, I found that the lens seemed to be a bit sharper at a setting of +2.  That is a significant difference.  So, I set the AF fine tune for that setting for the rest of the weekend.

My subsequent images look like most are properly focused.  Again, there was an inconsistency in focus, even when the lens was firmly locked to my large Induro 410 tripod.  I found that when either locked down or when panning with moving wildlife, the lens would sometimes hit perfect focus and sometimes not.

Now, when the lens did hit focus properly, I still found the fine details of my subjects were mostly mushy or missing.  Take a look at the bald eagle at the top of this post.  The lens focused correctly, but there was almost not detail in the white feathers and soft detail in the brown feathers.  In order for me to bring out the detail, I had to export the image into Topaz Detail 3 and use that plug-in to enhance the detail.  That should have to be done.

Tundra Swans, Chincoteague NWR (click to enlarge)

I don't know if I received a sub-par copy of the Tamrom 150-600mm lens, or if they are all that way so I won't pass judgement.  I will say that I would not buy that copy of lens for my personal use.  It just consistently underperformed.  I don't know if Tamron's quality control is lacking, if they use lesser electronics or focusing mechanisms not as precise as Canon or Nikon or, again, I just got a copy that wasn't very good.  Or, maybe my expectations and standards are too high!  Or, I'm just a lousy wildlife photographer!  No final judgement from me on this lens.

I made 1042 exposures over the weekend.  I plan on editing them over today and tomorrow.  I'll post some additional images on Wednesday—if I can find some that I feel are worthy.

I need to drop off the lens at a FedEx facility this morning so I don't get charged an extra day.  I'm out the door....

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.


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