Last week I wrote, “I want as much focal length as I can get when making a portrait. The longer lens is my choice and depending on the ratio of length to weight as in my 70-200mm it is in my opinion a perfect lens in the studio.”
As I sat in my shop I looked at the Tamron 300mm f2.8 lens that I had put aside to send for repair of a faulty auto focus. The lens has a hard time grabbing focus – I don’t think it’s severely damaged. Those old Tamron’s produced from 1984 -1992 were great lenses and photographers would purchase particular adapters depending on the camera brand they were using. I expect there might be a problem with the adapter not making a good connection with my modern camera. However, it works great on manual and when in auto focus mode I can place my finger on the lens barrel to make it select focus as I watch he little green focus alert.
Returning to what I wrote about photographer Dean Collins and him using a 300mm on his 35mm film camera in that long ago workshop I attended I decided it would be fun to take try using it in spite of its focusing problem and was sure I could get my friend, Jo’s children to pose for me.
I brought that 300mm lens home with me Saturday evening and tried it on different cameras to see if it might work. It was fine on the old Nikon D3 I have at my shop, but it was a problem with my newer camera bodies.
Saturday evening Jo’s daughter Evinn came to show me her new hairstyle. Evinn normally has long curly hair that really is a showstopper. However, her new style was beautifully long straight hair. I had her twirl around to show me how it looked and after complimenting her I suggested that I wanted to take some portraits the next day. Gosh, that worked out perfectly for me.
Jo texted me later and said Evinn would be dressing up and we could all go out in the street to do some photos when it warmed up on Sunday.
Sunday morning at 10:30 I joined Jo, Evinn and Jo’s son Emit on the road for photos. Emit was employed to hold Evinn’s long dress out and toss it in the air as Evinn posed.
Jo brought two lenses, a 70-200mm and a 14-24mm. I had the 300mm.
The morning was cool but not uncomfortable and Evinn as always was a good young model.
Regarding my use of the faulty 300mm. I did miss many of the action shots that included the dress being thrown in the air and Evinn spinning around. I got a few, but the still shots were better because I had time to make the focus grab. I used my camera on Shutter priority while paying attention to keeping the aperture at f/2.8, 3.5 or f/4.
The day was nicely overcast with only a bit of sun poking out…my favourite for outdoor portraiture, and I had set my ISO to 650. ISO 650 allowed me to keep the shutter-speed fast enough to do away with camera shake and easily stop any subject movement. And I can say that even though the auto focus wasn’t great, when I did catch focus the lens preformed wonderfully. For the still portraits and even a couple of the spinning shots, the photos I got were great and the "bokeh" or out of focus background was excellent. The 300mm is so nice with an image quality that was sharp, smooth and compressed.
The colour photographs were great, but I like the black and white pictures the best. The 300mm was a fun lens to use and I did get some great shots of Jo’s daughter. That big 300mm wouldn’t be my first choice for a long portrait session, but its always fun to check out different lenses.
Stay safe and be creative. These are my thoughts for this week. Contact me at www.enmanscamera.com or emcam@telus.net.
