I Have A New Lens – And I’ve Never Had One Like It Before!

As you all know, since having my Nikon Z6ii and going full frame, my photography has changed. My results have been hugely better, my mindset has become much more focused and my editing has become built on realistic colours without any of the strange colours shifts that many of my photographs from the Fujifilm years had.

I’ve been looking at my photography and building up a lens arsenal that will take me into the future and grow with me and my work. As such, I came to the decision that I would replace all my Nikon F-Mount glass with the far superior Z-Mount glass. It is not just the image quality that makes them superior, but also things like the autofocus and size, being generally smaller than their F-Mount counterparts.

On today’s trip to the camera store, I traded in my Nikon 50mm F/1.8, Nikon 14-24mm and Nikon 70-300mm. My replacement, the highly rated Tamron Z-Mount 150-500mm F/5-6.7 lens!

I’ve always “made do” with a 18-300mm or 70-300mm lens for general wildlife, birds and landscapes, and as I am making a change, I thought to myself, “why not go all out and get a decent telephoto lens”. After much reading and watching YouTube, this was the lens that I decided on.

It is not a cheap lens, but was currently a couple of hundred pounds off in a summer sale, now at £1000. So I traded my lenses and adapters and a few other bits and pieces and now have a lens that I can use for the things that I’ve always struggled with, but had great results using up to 300mm.

Here are 5 sample images, taken in my garden just after receiving the lens. I wanted to test out a number of things, namely closest focus distance at 150mm, closest focus distance at 500mm, AF lock on for bird in flight, hand held slower shutter speed (the sparrow was at 1/80th hand-held) and crop ability with a very distant object (the aeroplane). I’m glad to say that the lens passed each test with flying colours!

Of course, this is just an early look at the lens, and you’ll be seeing a lot more images taken with this lens in the future, including some portraits, which I think will work amazing with this lens! For those interested, here are a few technical specifications:

• Focal Length: 150-500mm
• Minimum Object Distance: 0.6m (WIDE) 1.8m (TELE)
• Maximum Magnification Ratio: 1:3.1 (WIDE) 1:3.7 (TELE)
• Filter Size: 82mm
• Weight: 1720 g (Nikon Z-Mount)
• For full technical specifications, please see this link to the lens.

My first impressions having taken 30 images with the lens. It will be great for macro work with insects and flowers as the autofocus is accurate, it should be great for birds as the autofocus is fast and accurate. It will be interesting for portrait shoots, and it is something I really want to explore. Of course, this lens can be used for landscapes, sports and so much more, so what the future holds, we do not know!

Stay tuned for much more to come on this lens, and please leave your comments below.