Tamron 70-300 - SPONSORED

Hey, what's up guys, Professional Outdoor Photographer, David Johnson here, for outdoor photography guide. And today, what I wanna tell you about is one of my new favorite lenses for outdoor photography and that is the Tamron 70 to 300 F4.5 to 6.3 Di III RXD lens for Sony E-Mount cameras. Now, I use Sony cameras for the outdoor scene because I feel like it gives me the best opportunity to photograph the scenes in which I'm visiting. Now, what I think is great about this lens varies across a multitude of topics through several months of testing this lens out in the field in multiple different scenarios. First and foremost, though, what I think the best thing about this lens is, is the size and weight.

If you look at the comparison here between the Tamron 70 to 300 and the Sony 70 to 200 F 0.4 lens is pretty significant. You get a little bit smaller of a lens with the 70 to 300, but extra reach with this one. And with the Sony 70 to 200, it's a little bit longer, it's much, much heavier than this one. And you're losing a little bit of reach a hundred millimeters and range total when you're using this one versus the 70 to 300. Now, size and weight are huge for me because as outdoor photographers, we're going on long hikes we're packing all of our gear into our bags and we're going to extensive locations.

When I'm trying to pack my bag with a telephoto lens, I'm always worried about how much space it's going to take out and how much heavier that it's going to make my camera bag. I didn't have to worry about that at all with the 70 to 300 from Tamron because it is so light. When you're using a lens like this, what you're using is a footer attached to your tripod, what I'm holding with my hand right now. And it just gets a little bit annoying to constantly maneuver that around. With the 70 to 300, it's so light.

You don't have to use a footer, you can just attach it to your tripod like you normally would with a wide angle lens or a mid range lens that you would be photographing in the field with. Now, I mentioned testing this lens out for several months in multiple different locations using multiple different techniques of photography. I shot small scenes with focus stacking to really fine-tune, how much detail I could pull out of a very small scene in the outdoors. I photograph waterfalls at 300 millimeters across a huge Canyon in the fall to really fine-tune those details and see how good the quality of this lens was at the furthest extent. And it proved to be extremely good quality, when I did zoom up and post-processing and fine-tune a lot of the details that were present when I was there in the outdoor scene, why I'm photographing these locations in the first place.

So, it went far above and beyond where I expected it to be even at 300 millimeters. I also did techniques with this lens in familiar locations, but doing something a little bit different with time-lapse photography. And I was a little bit skeptical and nervous about how this would perform because conditions were so great when I was there. I was very tempted to just take still frames but I wanted to test how good this lens could be when I was doing time-lapse photography. And the reach that this gave me, the first time lapse at 70 millimeters, the second at 200 millimeters and some of the other ones at 300 millimeters giving me that total reach allowed me to create a whole story to a location.

Showing you something a little bit further off and zooming in on the fine details to show you how much fog and how much detail were in a location and bring you through the entire morning as I was out shooting. So the quality on this lens is extremely good across the board even down into the corners and sides of the frame. You could tell that there was a lot of detail and a lot of attention to how good the quality of these images that they could create when Tamron was making this lens. Now, when I am photographing out in the landscape, I don't always like to use a tripod when I'm shooting with a telephoto lens. I just feel like it gives me a little bit more control to hold this and get the composition exactly as I want it.

The challenge there though, is how stable and how still can you get your images especially at that longest distance that your lens can go to, in this case 300 millimeters. Now, those waterfall shots that I took were on a tripod. But I wanted to test this out handheld. Could this lens perform well at 300 millimeters paired with the IBIS System, the In-Body Image Stabilization System. And I was absolutely blown away.

I could easily hold this camera in my hand at 300 millimeters and photograph everything that I wanted to, whether that be a still frame of small details, at long distances, or even an abstract shot that I could completely control and use something like intentional camera movement to photograph some foliage in a forest. I was very, very nervous that this lens would not be able to hold up to the image shake at 300 millimeters. However, I was very, very pleased at how well this lens did and how light it was when I was photographing all the way zoomed in at 300 millimeters photographing those fine details in the outdoors. So, if you're looking for a telephoto lens for outdoor photography, and you want something that gives you a great amount of reach that performs at a very high quality over a multitude of techniques when you are going out to photograph, I would say that the 70 to 300 F4.5 to 6.3 lens for Sony E-Mount cameras is exactly what you want it to be. Kind of your Jack-of-all-trades telephoto lens for everything in the outdoors and at a lightweight, smaller body probably the lightest, smallest telephoto lens that I've ever photographed with in the outdoors.

That also gave me the highest quality that I would expect out of my own photography.