Photography with the Tamron 17-28 Lens

Hey, what's up guys, professional outdoor photographer David Johnston here with outdoor photography guide. And I wanted to come to you from my home state of Tennessee today to talk to you about my favorite wide angle lens for outdoor photography. And that is the Tamron 17 to 28 F 2.8 lens right here. I've been using this lens for several months now and I've loved every second of using this lens. And I wanted to tell you a few reasons why I believe it's my new favorite lens for outdoor photography.

Now, when I'm using a wide angle lens like this one, a 17 to 28 millimeter lens, number one I want a lot of versatility that comes with handling that lens and using it in a lot of different situations. So when I mean versatility, I'm talking about I want to be able to use this lens with all types of photography that go into outdoor photography. So I'm talking wildlife photography. I want to be able to take it out at early morning and late evening to photograph beautiful colors of the landscape. And I also even want to use this lens for night photography too.

You know, having a versatile lens means you're spending less money overall, but you're getting more bang for your buck because you have this lens to take out every single hour of the day. I want a zoom lens like this, with a 17 to 28 range that allows me to capture things really close to me in really dark situations and also capture objects that are pretty far away for a wide angle lens. But within that 28 millimeter range that this lens gives me and allows me to frame up better compositions in the outdoor scene. Now, I also love this lens for travel photography. Travel photography is one of those forgotten genres of the outdoor scene because we want to capture those memories that we have when we traveled to other worldly places, different cultures, photographing artisans, photographing different colors that are available to us.

And this lens allows me to do that. Now, the biggest benefit that I've found with this lens is that it allowed me to capture some really interesting features in low light situations. Having a faster lens like that gives me professional results with an F 2.8 widest aperture range. That allows me to really bring in a ton of light that's coming in from the surrounding area and allows me to use a little bit faster shutter speeds that I couldn't normally do with say an F 4, an F 5.6. So the F 2.8 allows me to capture low light situations, Milky way photography, interesting night photography scenes, and also those travel photography, wildlife photography, because for those things you're getting out really early in the morning in really low light.

You want to be able to capture those scenes really well. Now let's talk about the range real quick of this lens. I've mentioned it a couple of times the 17 to 28 range allows me to capture things that are mid range level. So what do I mean by that? Well, take this photograph for example of some elephants that are grazing in a field in Africa that I shot with this lens.

Just an amazing scene. With other wide angle lenses you can't really do that because of the lack of range that they have. However, staying safely inside my Safari vehicle I was able to frame up a really good composition of these elephants grazing in the field and capturing this memory that I can now have for the rest of my life and remember how special that moment was for me. Now, I know every outdoor photographer wants to know about image quality with a lens like this and image quality is definitely an interesting question that you need to ask yourself when you are looking to get a new lens or upgrade your lenses. Let me tell you right now after using this lens there is no to very minimal drop-off on the corners and edges, even with a wide angle lens look like this.

A lot of times when you look at image quality from a lens across the board, it's really sharp in the middle of the frame. Which is kind of what you expect, but then as you get slowly towards those corners and edges of the frame your image quality starts to drop off a bit. And that's just from the wide angle lens look that it creates. However, with this lens I didn't really find much or any drop off at all. And looking at these images that I shot with it, you can tell that I do have very tax sharp subjects even on the very far edges of the frame.

Even down to a minimal blade of grass, you can see that this lens has tremendous image quality. Even if you are shooting with a camera that has low megapixel count this lens will give you very sharp images all the way across the board. Now I love tech specs as much as any other outdoor photographer out there but I really look at real world capabilities on a lens like this. How functional is it actually taking it out in the field? I traveled across the globe with this lens.

Putting it on airplanes, taking it off, in and out of bags in dusty situations. This lens is an absolute beast and it's portable. It's small enough. It's light enough that you can basically take it anywhere that you want to go. Take it out of your bag, have it attached to your camera, bring it out and shoot those perfect images that are really going to reflect your infield vision of what you want to capture in outdoor photography.

So would I recommend this lens? A hundred percent. Like I said, this is my new favorite wide-angle lens for outdoor photography and there's several reasons why. When you guys get yours and see it for yourself, you're going to completely agree with me in saying man, Tamron made a killer wide angle lens with this 17 to 28 millimeter F 2.8 wide-angle lens.