We recently spent a week at Mount Maunganui on holiday, a welcome break after work and exams. After a fruitless few months searching for one, we finally found a Nikon mount Tamron 150-600mm in Carters Photographics in Tauranga, who kindly let us test it out on birds down at the waterfront. In other reviews you’ll find technical details on the performance of the lens, but I’m just going to focus on the usability of the lens from my point of view. I use long lenses for wildlife, mainly birds, and often flying birds – so it’s important to me that the lenses I use are fast to focus and sharp. I’ve been excited to try out the Tamron, which has had many glowing reviews. It’s a affordable lens with a huge reach – what’s not to love?
I tested the Tamron on my D300, and Dad on the D810 (see his review here). The lenses I compared it to were the Nikon 80-400mm, and my own Nikon 70-300mm. That may seem an odd lens to compare it to, but it would be the one that the 150-600 would replace in my travel kit, were I to buy it. The Tamron 150-600 is a serious chunk of glass. It’s substantially heavier than the 70-300mm and slightly heavier than the 80-400mm, but I didn’t find the weight to be a problem – I’m used to the much heavier 200-400 f/4.
We had the Tamron for the afternoon, and took it down to the waterfront to shoot flying gulls. The wind was high, so the birds were flying fast, and it was the brightest light you could hope for. The first thing I noticed about the Tamron is that it’s front-heavy. It zooms out a long way to get to 600, and the front elements are large. It’s not a big problem, but it does make the lens feel a little unbalanced when it is zoomed out past about 450mm.
I like the size of the foot on the lens – much bigger and sturdier than the tiny one that comes with the Nikon 80-400mm. It fits nicely in the hand and positions it just under the zoom ring, which is handy. It’s a great lens in terms of physical usability, although zooming it in and out requires quite a bit of wrist-work. In terms of sharpness I was very impressed with the lens. Even out to 600mm you get workable images, with only slight loss of detail. 500mm is better, but if I bought one I wouldn’t be too fussed about zooming in all the way to 600mm.
I loved the reach of this lens, this was shot at the full 600mm end.
Detail of the above image – nice feather texture even at 600mm.
Flying birds – the main test. Unfortunately, I struggled to catch and keep focus on the gulls. Nearly every flight image I have is soft, and in those that aren’t the birds is already headed away. For stationary or slow-moving birds it was fine, but for a gull soaring overhead? Not a chance. Even in the brightest light possible, the lens was just too slow – probably a function of the maximum aperture at 600mm, which is f/6.3 (The D300 needs f/5.6 for best results, but Dad had the same result with the D810 which is best to f/8). However, even zoomed out I found tracking and panning to be an issue, even against clean backgrounds with high-contrast subjects. Another thing that didn’t work for me was the Tamrons focus lock, which goes from 15m-infinity. Birds often come much closer than 15m, so while I was testing I had to leave it on Full. This may have effected the time it took to focus, but it was necessary to get any photographs at all.
No flight shots worth sharing, but I liked this image of the Red-billed Gull drinking from a spraying fountain.
So would I buy the Tamron? It’s got reach, sharpness, and it’s well built and affordable, but it’s too slow for me. In the brightest light you could hope for, it couldn’t focus reliably on flying birds, which are one of my main subjects. Working in low-light at the ends of the day as I quite often do, this wouldn’t be ideal for me. For perched or slow-flying birds or larger animals it would be a great lens, but I’m not willing to make a compromise on focusing speed to get more reach.
In comparison, the (much more expensive) 80-400mm will grab a flying bird at a moment’s notice, and the 70-300mm is much the same. For a cheap lens, the 70-300mm is still my favourite – it’s quick to focus and usually quite sharp. It’s also extremely light and compact, and while lacking the phenomenal reach of the Tamron, I’ve found it more than adequate for wildlife photography.
Catch of the day: Two photos of a lone White-Fronted Tern with my trusty 70-300mm. Fast and sharp!
