Tamron Blog: Angle of View

Adventures with Tamron : Pebble Beach

By Jillian Bell

With all of my postings, a common thread involves searching for inspiration. Another personal goal I find is to photograph ordinary objects in a new and creative way. The examples in this blog are great examples of these two concepts. In honor of our first real snowfall in Minnesota, I found inspiration in the color white. Often if I'm stuck, or feeling uninspired, I'll simplify an idea into a word, or concept (i.e. white, or lines, or macro, or night photography). Then I can focus on how to get the best photographs that portray that idea. I also chose to focus on macro photography because I haven't played with my Tamron SP 90mm F2.8 Macro in some time. If you can't tell by now, these photographs are not photos of Pebble Beach, CA. Although I have a trip in January to California that I'm looking forward to. To start, I looked around for things that are white and found some coconut M&Ms at the grocery store. Flipping them all over gave me a repetitive shape to fill the frame. The candies also had these delightful palm trees and umbrellas that I did not expect. This is where the name "Pebble Beach" came from. The palm trees and round repetitive shapes reminded me of a rocky beach. Each of these three photographs take the same scene, working with composition to achieve three different photographs. When photographing white objects, all cameras will meter to a neutral grey. It is important to over expose slightly, giving the white values their full brightness. The exposure for these three shots are ISO 800, F11 @ 1/40th of a second. With an exposure compensation of +0.07. Using a higher ISO allowed me to handhold these images, if I were to try it again, I would prefer to shoot at ISO 100 for better detail, while using a tripod. In the last photograph, I drew in my beach bum for an added bit of whimsey. A sunny scene while I'm inside drinking my hot cocoa. Thank you for reading, and as always, keep your eyes open for inspiration.

Ladybug: Larger than Life

By André Costantini

Its been a pretty warm month. And warmth is great for a lot of things like not wearing winter jackets and... insects! The other day I noticed a ladybug on the glass of my back door. It is a little late in the year to see them around (at least outside) in the Northeast, but alas, the weather apparently was about right for this ladybug. Seeing it, I quickly snapped on my Tamron SP 60mm 1:1 macro lens and had a go of trying to get a nice image of this colorful insect. The great thing about using true macro lenses, like the Tamron 60mm is that you can magnify your subject at 1:1 or true life size. This maximum magnification is always found at the minimum focus distance of the lens.

The closest you can focus the lens is just over 9 inches, which, by the way is always measured from the focal plane (where the actual chip is) of your camera. For those who are really interested, it is inscribed into your actual camera body. You will see a circle with a line through it on the top of your camera towards the back of your body.

The best way to get the most macro your lens has is to manually focus it to the closest focus point, sometimes referred to as the MOD (minimum object distance) and physically move back and forth until the object is in focus. You can of course use the auto focus, but then you risk not getting the most macro that your lens has!

There are a few things you may want to know about macro. True macro lenses, give you actual life size, 1:1 magnification. This means the size of the image you see in the viewfinder is the actual size the object is. One of the results of this feature is that you "lose" about 2 stops of light, so the F2.0 in the Tamron 60mm shoots at F4.0. This is normal for all true macro lenses. Though many zoom lenses have a macro feature, they are not in fact true macro. True macro lenses are fixed focal length lenses, this means that they do not zoom.

Anyhow, enough about the backstory and let's talk about the images. The first image has a blue background because the window was reflecting the blue sky and so the background is blue. It was taken at 1:1, the minimum focus distance of the Tamron 60mm macro. For the second image, I put on a Tamron 2X teleconverter. A 2X teleconverter increases the focal length of the lens by 2, so the 60mm effectively becomes a 120mm. But the effect of using it on a true macro lens increases the macro power by 2 making it a 2:1 macro. That is twice the size of reality!

All 2X teleconverters also take away 2 more stops of light (so this image was taken at effectively F8. But they increase the focal length and don't change the minimum focusing distance. What this all really means is that the subject appears bigger in your frame, making it larger than life.

Timing is Everything, but Luck is Good too!

By Ken Hubbard

So there you are in Kelso, Washington and you don't have to be at the airport until 1:00pm the next day, what do you do? Oh yeah, it's also been raining pretty much for the past 4 days straight, I ask again what do you do? Well, if you happen to be with another professional landscape photographer, in this case Ed Heaton from PA, you will convince yourselves it's a great idea to wake up before sunrise and head out to Mount Saint Helen's. Since I've always wanted to see the blast zone area of this amazing place, it didn't take much to talk myself into getting up to see it. Even though the clouds where low and it was raining (of course it was) we still made our way up highway 504 which headed towards the Johnston Ridge Observatory. To tell the truth, for me there is a nervous excitement that surrounds places like Mount Saint Helens, the sheer magnitude of destruction that took place within a few minutes, is amazing to me.

On May 18th 1980, Mount Saint Helens erupted, creating a 5.1 mag. earthquake, collapsing the entire north face of the volcano, then a slab of rock and ice slammed into Spirit Lake, crossed a ridge 1,300 feet high, and roared 14 miles down the Toutle River, and finally a lateral explosion occurred and nearly 150 square miles of forest was blown over or left dead and standing.

Knowing these facts and getting our first few signs of destruction, we continued to march on, hoping the clouds would break. As the altitude started to rise, every now and then we would get a good glimpse of the valley and our hopes would rise and fall with every bit of bright light but then the skies would darken and clouds would impede our view. I was starting to convince myself that this trip was going to end up being a scouting trip, and there would be little to no chance of capturing anything worthwhile. Boy, was I wrong.

As Ed and I pulled into a vantage point just before the Observatory, we planned on stepping out for just a second then continuing on. I stopped my car and we looked out into the valley that led to the volcano, I got a familiar feeling, it was that feeling of being very small compared to mother nature. The clouds were moving extremely quick and in many different directions from the strong winds, slowly a small bit of the volcano started to show itself. Then, all of a sudden a burst of light filled the valley, it took us both by surprise and Ed's exact quote was "I think we better move quickly". We did, grabbing our gear, setting up and trying to fire off as many images as we could before the light disappeared. We were lucky enough to get about 10 minutes of shooting before the clouds took over and covered up Mount Saint Helens once again. If we were there 5 minutes earlier or 5 minutes later, we would never have captured what we did. No matter how much you plan or try and figure out every equation, luck still comes into play every now and then!

What calls to you?

Sometimes, a single image is a great day in image making. I have selected a couple from recent trips that sort of show that.

The first image is about being aware of the final output and separating what's important from the clutter around it. (Inclusion/exclusion). I was on my way to the Denver airport from Colorado Springs with a little time to spare, so I stopped at the Garden of the Gods. Unfortunately, traffic was intense and time was short. So, I couldn't go into the park. But I decided to stop at the visitors center outside the entrance. From the second floor balcony, this was the scene:

As soon as I saw the scene, I saw the final image in my mind. It just said: "HELLO!". Not the entirety of what was there. But, just what was calling to me, the entrance to the park, backed by Pikes Peak:

Also, recently, while in the Northwest with the 4Cs PSA convention, I had a side trip and found two images that I did not have to search out. They screamed out at me to be explored.

Nothing was done except to remove the extraneous elements in the scenes and some tonal adjustments. All that was done was to be open to not just looking, but seeing what wanted to be seen.

Fun With Agates

By Mike Moats

As winter approaches I start searching for macro subjects to shoot indoors. I have a collection of slab agates that I've purchased over time from online sites that offer a variety of thin polished rock slabs with some interesting designs. This is a Laguna Lace Agate Slab from, www.dandyslab.com. It's always fun searching for unique patterns in these beautiful rocks. I shot this with the Tamron SP 60mm macro lens.

Check out both sides if you buy any slabs, as the patterns vary on each side.

Lots of fun with these rock slabs

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Focal plane and controlling your depth of field on somewhat flat surfaces

By Ken Hubbard

When capturing images with a macro lens, such as the Tamron SP 60mm F/2.0 1:1 Macro, focus is always critical. As with any lens, the closer you physically move towards your subjects the shallower depth of field becomes. Since you can be as close as 9 inches to your subject (measured from your camera sensor to the front point of your subject) with this macro lens, depth of field is extremely shallow. Now, the test is how do you control that depth of field and keep as much of your subject in focus as possible? For this blog I will start with a somewhat flat surface subject, a very small fern growing on a split rail fence. I position my camera and lens so that the front element of the lens is parallel to the flat subject, being the rail and fern. With the lens and subject now being on the same focal plane, no part of the subject (corner to corner) is any closer or further away to the lens, allowing for a in focus image through out. If I was off parallel (Lens to subject), part of the subject would be closer and part would be further away, causing some of the image to be out of focus. See diagram and image below.