Tamron 17-35mm f/2.8-4 Di OSD
Discussion
8bit said:
Anyone got/had/used one of these? I'm in the market for something like this, reviews online look promising, interested to hear "real world" views before I go ahead. Main uses will be night sky, landscapes, some automotive uses. I'll be using it with my Nikon D610.
Small world today!I was going to suggest a s/h Nikon 17-55mm f2.8 then realised your're FX. Doh!
I owned one for a year up until a couple of weeks ago. I only sold it as I no longer had a camera to fit it to. It hadn't done anything wrong.
Quite a number of shots on my flickr are with this lens. Exif stuff should be attached to confirm. Go back to shots from the boat on Crummock backward.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56722309@N04/
When this lens released it was a total box ticker for me. Wide aperture at the wide end (for astro), weather sealed, light weight, affordable and could take filters. Image quality from lenses these days seems to be a given but it is excellent. And maybe most importantly performs well wide open at 17mm with well controlled coma noise. I was over the moon with mine.
There are two downsides that I should mention. No focus scale which may or may not be an issue. And although you can manually overide auto focus it doesn't really feel like you're meant to! There is resistance there where as most lenses with AF overide turn freely.
It's a yes from me, highly recommended.
Quite a number of shots on my flickr are with this lens. Exif stuff should be attached to confirm. Go back to shots from the boat on Crummock backward.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56722309@N04/
When this lens released it was a total box ticker for me. Wide aperture at the wide end (for astro), weather sealed, light weight, affordable and could take filters. Image quality from lenses these days seems to be a given but it is excellent. And maybe most importantly performs well wide open at 17mm with well controlled coma noise. I was over the moon with mine.
There are two downsides that I should mention. No focus scale which may or may not be an issue. And although you can manually overide auto focus it doesn't really feel like you're meant to! There is resistance there where as most lenses with AF overide turn freely.
It's a yes from me, highly recommended.
Thanks Gad. Nice shots 
The only thing that jumps out from your very useful post is about the lack of focus ring. I guess this is a confession of laziness on my part but when doing astro stuff I generally just set whatever lens I'm using to infinity and disable AF. With the lack of a focus ring, how would one focus at night?
The only thing that jumps out from your very useful post is about the lack of focus ring. I guess this is a confession of laziness on my part but when doing astro stuff I generally just set whatever lens I'm using to infinity and disable AF. With the lack of a focus ring, how would one focus at night?
8bit said:
Thanks Gad. Nice shots
The only thing that jumps out from your very useful post is about the lack of focus ring. I guess this is a confession of laziness on my part but when doing astro stuff I generally just set whatever lens I'm using to infinity and disable AF. With the lack of a focus ring, how would one focus at night?
Hard to answer this without sounding condescending so please take this in the helpful spirit intended, but basically you're doing it wrong! The only thing that jumps out from your very useful post is about the lack of focus ring. I guess this is a confession of laziness on my part but when doing astro stuff I generally just set whatever lens I'm using to infinity and disable AF. With the lack of a focus ring, how would one focus at night?
Most lenses are not well calibrated for infinity so when you set the lens to infinity, you rarely actually hit that. And that's before you take it account how much lenses are affected by ambient temperature etc. Getting focus just a fraction off will result in images that look okay on a small screen but as soon as you take a closer look you'll see stars that are blobs rather than points of light.
There are other methods but I find by far the most accurate method is to do this in the field. You stick your camera on a tripod and look for the brightest star you can see and point the camera at it. Zoom in as far as you can using live view and then manually adjust the focus until the star appears as small as you can get it. And then don't touch it again. It's still worth checking this from time to time by zooming into the images you have taken.
If you cannot use the above method you could stick a torch on the ground 100m or more away and focus on that but if the stars are already out I find focussing on them is by far the best way to go. Some live view systems are better than others but the D610 is a good'n so should work well. The wider the aperture lens, the easier to grab accurate focus and f/2.8 should be enough.
This is just my own personal approach, there are some great articles dotted around the web about focussing. It's probably the most important aspect of technique in typical astrophotography.
Edited by Gad-Westy on Friday 21st February 16:55
Gad-Westy said:
Hard to answer this without sounding condescending so please take this in the helpful spirit intended, but basically you're doing it wrong!
No worries, taken as intended - always happy to learn something new Thanks for that, I almost never use live view but I'll give it a shot.
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