Thanksgiving (f)2.0

 By André Costantini

Okay, it's official. The only lens I ever want to use is the Tamron 60mm f2.0. I thought I would start out using it on Thanksgiving weekend but then it apparently never came off the camera. In fact it's still on there. I'm not sure how the weather was where you were, but in Sullivan County New York it was sunny and in the 60's. Images here chronicle Rees and his grandfather on a little hike in the woods and the surrounding area. The widest aperture I used on any of these was f3.5 all the way down to it's wide open f2.0. I love the way that the lens isolates the subject so well from the background and how the background blurs the closer you get to the subject. I shot all of these images in the manuel exposure mode but I used the Auto White Balance, because the color of the light changes from in the woods, to in the field to inside. It also changes from the shadow side to the sunny side. When you are following around a subject in changing conditions, there is not always time to make all the adjustments you would like to. For me, changing the color balance later is easy to do, especially because I am shooting in the RAW file format. I find it more critical to get the exposure correct. Because there are many conditions which can fool the camera's meter such as backlight or dark tones in the background of the frame,I had the camera set in manual exposure mode. This gives me the control I need to properly adjust exposure for the skin tones.

There is no heavy post production work done on these images other then adjusting the white balance a few hundred degrees here and there and an exposure tweak that never exceeds 1/3 stop and one image is black and white. You may notice a subtle vignette on some of the images. It is a function of using the 60mm lens on a full frame 35mm digital camera, even though it is really designed for the APS-C sensor. In other words the vignette is a result of this combination of equipment and achieves this effect in camera.

One day I will take the 60mm lens off my camera and use something else, but at the rate I'm going, not any time soon.

Comments

[HERNAN RODRIGUEZ]

Very nice images Andre. It is very lifestyle editorial. My fav is grandpa kissing Jr.
Your fellow blogger
HERNAN

[Markus Liu]

Dear Tamron technical team,

There are lots of reports, that the Tamron 60 f2 is having an unterexposing problem with Nikon bodies. The best example would be the trusted review from photozone. But there are also flickr member or member from dpreview telling the same. There "is" a problem with Nikon bodies and each time they wrote a letter to the tamron service, they got the answer that there isn't any problem.
Is there a possibility that this could get fixed? I would buy the lens, but not if it inconsistently underexposes.

[irvingia]

He is so cute. Those are the sweetest photo i can view.