Tamron 17-50mm F/4

Hey, what's up guys? Professional outdoor photographer, David Johnson here for outdoor photography guide. And today, I'm challenging myself to get three shots in one shoot with one lens. Now, if you ask a lot of outdoor photographers, they're going to say the trinity of lenses are a wide angle, a midrange and a telephoto. The wide angle is usually something wider than 24 millimeters. The midrange can go from 24 to 70 then the telephoto is 70 to 200. Now, you may be asking yourself what lens are you using to try and do all of this. I'm using this Tamron 17 to 50 F four lens. The reason I love Tamron lenses are because they make great lenses that cover a wide range. Now, this lens in particular is a cool one because all of the zoom is internal. So this lens never changes size and it goes from 17 to 50 millimeters at a widest aperture of F four, which is big because you can literally take this lens anywhere and shoot anything with it. I'm going to prove it to you today in this forest scene. So I just came across my first shot that I'm going to get with this 17 to 50 F four lens from Tamron and it's these really cool mushrooms that are growing right along the trunk of this fallen tree. There's lots of colors and detail within these mushrooms that I'm going to try to photograph in kind of a macro style. So to do that, what I'm gonna do is set this lens to either a 50 or 35 millimeter, probably going with 50 here to capture the macro style as best as possible. I like to save 35 millimeters for those scenes where I'm photographing straight at the ground with, we're going to get to in just a second. So let me take you through this shot as I'm doing it, I'm trying to get a lot of blurring into the background with these. But I'm also trying to get enough detail in the mushrooms to really make a cool macro scene. So my settings on this are 50 millimeters. I'm at 1/60 of a second F four and an iso of 400 because we're losing light. It's so late in the day, the lights going down. So I'm trying to maximize the light here. Now, I want to shoot this at an angle because the more depth I have off into the distance, the more blurring I get into the back of the photo and there we go, there's our shot, our macro scene for the day. Now let's move on to a small scene, also known as intimate scenes and we'll walk through that one. So for our small scene, there are a lot of really interesting leaves and textures and colors down on the ground that are reflecting the nice soft light that's going off at sunset here. Now there's not a ton of cloud cover in the sky, so it doesn't look like we're going to get a sunset, but we can work around that. I'll show you how to do that with the wide scene in just a minute. But for these small scenes and a lens like this that can cover 17 to 50 millimeters in one trip. I'm going to set this to about 35 millimeters to get that classic photography look. And I'm going to try to pick out some leaves here on the ground that are going to make a really interesting composition. So I'll take you through the shot here. I'm straddling this area of leaves on the ground and I'll take you through the settings and I'll just flip my screen up so I can see the composition I'm working with here. I'm at 35 millimeters 1/60 of a second F four iso 400. So I haven't changed any of the settings from the last scene. But the reason that it's not going to create the depth like it did in the macro scene that we just shot is because I'm shooting straight on the ground. So we're dealing with a flat surface. So I'm not worried about any blurring in the back of the leaves and I'm just going to try to find a composition that I like a lot that works really good. Do my autofocus and take a few shots. This one looks pretty good. I might try and rotate my camera just a little bit, but I had to straddle this because there's not much room on the ground. But here's the shot we came up with. Now, the last shot on our list is a standard wide angle shot. I'm gonna take you through that even though we don't have a lot of cloud cover and no color in the sky. We're gonna see what we can get. So we've been able to create both a macro scene and a small landscape scene, the macro at 50 millimeters and the small scene at 35 millimeters. Now, I'm zooming all the way out to 17 millimeters on this lens to get a wide shot. Now, we don't have a ton of color in the sky right now, but we do have some really nice reflections on this pond. So I'm going to work with what we have here and try to create something a little bit more abstract for a wide angle scene because there's a lot of reflection on the pond. I'm gonna be using a neutral density filter to lengthen my exposure that's also paired with a circular polarizer that's going to create and maintain reflections in the water where I want it and reduce reflection in the water where I don't want the reflection. So here's that final photo of the wide angle scene that we created. And now you can see that we've successfully created a macro, a small scene and a wide angle shot all using one lens. I love zoom lenses for this sole purpose because I never had to change lenses on my camera. I use this Tamron 17 to 50 F four lens the entire time and it created amazing photos. If you're looking for a zoom lens look no further than Tamron and the 17 to 50 F four is a tremendous one for outdoor photography.