Category Archives: Tamron

Valencia’s Central Market

160424val01_sotc

The morning of my first full day in Valencia began with breakfast on the upper floor of the Astoria Palace Hotel, which had a great view overlooking the historic center of the city. Next, we walked a few short blocks to the Mercado Central, Valencia’s central market. Along the way, marveling once again at the architecture, and the inclusion of “dog parking” outside some of the shops.

160424val02_sotc

160424val03_sotc

On to the market itself:

160424val04_sotc

Markets are always among my favorite things to visit and photograph in any location. I love seeing the different produce available and it is always guaranteed to be a colorful display. This market was no different and did not disappoint.

160424val05_sotc

160424val07_sotc

160424val06_sotc

I even had a chance to play around with the new Tamron 90mm macro lens that I had been loaned for this trip. It was a joy to use and gave great results. I may have to look into adding one permanently to my bag:

160424val08_sotc

160424val09_sotc

Next, we would take some of the ingredients we had found at the market and visit a paella school to make our own lunch (although I admit to doing more “photographing” than “helping” when it came to the actual cooking). Next post…

The Giants and the Bigheads of San Fermin

140901sanfermin01_sotc

I mentioned in an earlier post how the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, is so much more than just the running of the bulls. One of my favorite parts of the festival is the visually stunning and family-friendly Comparsa of the Giants and Bigheads. The current Giant and Bighead characters date from around 1860, replacing older versions that had fallen into disrepair. Wherever they go, a crowd gathers. I saw them briefly on my first day in Pamplona, but the crowds were so tight it was difficult to find a position for good photographs. On my second day, I was lucky enough to run into them again during some free time and I managed much better.

140901sanfermin02_sotc

Coming upon the parade from behind, I could see where they would be going — which appeared to be a different route than they had taken the day before. This time they were heading down Estafeta Street — the same street I had scouted for my long telephoto shot of the running of the bulls. After getting a few shots of families enjoying the festivities from my initial vantage point, I set off to walk around a few blocks and be ready as the procession approached me closer to the bullfighting arena.

140901sanfermin03_sotc

And they arrived — coming right down Estafeta following the same path that the bulls do each morning. The shot below shows the full procession with the Bigheads in the lead and the Giants following behind. The Bigheads interact with the people in the crowd as the Giants twirl and dance.

140901sanfermin05_sotc

140901sanfermin04_sotc

This last shot is the one I was really looking for and hoping to get. I love the compression from the long lens (this was my Tamron 150-600mm zoom, set to 450mm) and the way the shallow depth-of-field isolated the Giants by softly blurring the balconies in the background. As you can see by the myriad children in all of these photos, this really is a family event and the kids love it. Hey, I loved it!

140901sanfermin06_sotc

New book and other announcements

Spain_Extremadura_cover

The latest book in my “Journals of a Travel Photographer” series is now available in the Blurb bookstore. Here’s a direct link, or you can visit the store page on my own website for links to this and other books in the series. The Spain book features images from an 8-day trip I made to the Extremadura region of Spain last year. It was my first trip to Spain and I immediately fell in love with the historic cities and Roman ruins found throughout the region. Check out the preview on the Blurb site for more. A Spanish-language version may be following soon.

The Extremadura book has actually been out for a couple of weeks, but I have been late in announcing it here on the blog due to a second trip I just made to Spain — this time to the province of Granada. I also plan on releasing a “Journal” book about this trip in a few months. Several blog posts will feature highlights over the coming days and weeks, as well. For a bit of a preview, however, you can check out my interview that was published in the Tamron e-newsletter last week:

tamron_enews_granada

The story features a few of the photos I made on the Granada trip using the Tamron 18-270mm VC PZD lens. I have also recently received their SP 150-600MM F/5-6.3 Di VC USD for testing — stay tuned for some future posts featuring images from that lens.

So there’s plenty on the way in the coming weeks. I just wanted to make sure I got this plug in for the Extremadura book before inundating you all with images from my more recent Granada trip.

Rainy day strategies

[sponsored post]

Stewart Island lies off the southern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. In this shot we’re just over the peninsula from the Island’s one town, Halfmoon Bay, and are overlooking Golden Bay, Thule Bay and the Paterson Inlet. Today’s destination is Ulva Island — a small, 670 acre island in Paterson Inlet that is being restored to its original predator-free ecosystem.

It’s also raining, which can make shooting photos during our walking tour challenging. I don’t have any waterproof housings but I do have a jacket and opt for a two body, two lens operation today. I’ll take the Nikon D700 with a 60mm macro lens and the D7000 with the Tamron 18-270. Here’s my thinking:

We’ll largely be in fairly dense rainforest where the reduced contrast of the overcast sky will actually help even out the light. I won’t want to include a lot of sky in any shots since it’s flat grey so I will instead focus on details — macro shots of the plants that we encounter on the walk. It will also allow me to shoot downward for the most part, eliminating the problem of rain getting on the front element of my lens. Neither camera-lens combination is large, so I can keep them both tucked into my partially zipped jacket and retrieve them only when needed. The second body with the 18-270 will be reserved primarily for those times when I encounter something that suddenly requires more than a prime 60. That might be a wide shot where the trail opens out onto a beach, or a telephoto shot of a bird. Birds are a large part of the visitor experience to Ulva Island so I hope to get something along those lines. By taking the 18-270 and a macro, I figure I’m set for nearly anything and I won’t have to deal with changing lenses in the rain.

Overall, this plan worked well. Once we made our way off of the beach and into the understory, the rain effect was lessened by the trees overhead, although the occasional drop that would land now was a much larger drop from a leaf than the small, misty raindrops on the beach. The trails wound through ferns and forgotten-looking plants that gave a real sense of what New Zealand must have once been like, before the main islands were largely cleared of trees for cultivation. I’ll show some of the macro shots in the next post but first I’ll show a couple of shots that made me thankful to have had the 270 end of the Tamron 18-270 zoom.

This tiny bird is a Toutouwai, or Stewart Island Robin. On the much larger end of the scale is this South Island KaKa:

A member of the parrot family, Kakas are about 18″ long and weigh a pound on average. That’s a pretty sizable bird. The Kaka didn’t come nearly as close as the Robin. There was another group a few yards ahead of us that he was curious about but the addition of our group coming up behind eventually proved too much and he took off. I was happy to get the images I did with the 18-270, but can only imagine the shots that a person could get with a little more time and patience on this island. For the most part, the birds are not that suspicious of people and will come fairly near. The haven’t really learned fear.

In the next post, I’ll share a few of the detail shots I took on this hike with the macro. Given the weather and limited time, I think the two lenses really allowed me to cover a lot of ground photographically speaking.

I should also mention one other foul-weather tip — the landscape at the top of this post (also shot with the Tamron 18-270) was fairly grey and colorless due to the overcast skies and impending rain. Once I brought it into Lightroom, I opted to alter the white balance to give the scene a cooler, blue cast. The result resembles the light you might get just before dawn or after sunset, even though it was shot near mid-day. Filters can also be used on-camera for this effect but, anymore, I prefer to leave my options open for playing with different color temperatures at the point of post-processing instead. By shooting in RAW, I have the ability to make several versions in different tones without any damage to the original image. One of the great benefits of today’s digital photography tools.

Yellow-Eyed Penguin encounter

[sponsored post]

It all started when we visited the fossilized forest at Curio Bay on New Zealand’s southeastern coast. In the photo above, you can see one of the ancient, petrified trees that are visible in the rock at low tide. We were told that the endangered Yellow-Eyed Penguins are frequently spotted in the area but that they are usually only making their way between the ocean and their nesting areas at sunrise and sunset. As we were there near mid-day, it was doubtful we would see any. If we did, however, signs instructed visitors to keep at least two car-lengths away to make sure the penguins could go about their business undisturbed.

Wanting to get clear of the bulk of the tourists at the site, I picked up my pace and headed for the far end of the rocky beach where I found some great examples of the petrified logs and stumps and began photographing them. A few moments later, a sound caught my attention and I looked up to see two Yellow-Eyed Penguins emerging from the underbrush at the top of the beach.

One was more bashful and stayed in the shade but, as I continued to photograph them, the other made his way cautiously onto the beach. I picked a location where it looked like he would cross my path, but where he wouldn’t come so close that I would disturb him. Once again — as had happened on several occasions on this trip — I was happy to have brought along my Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens. I hadn’t been expecting to be photographing wildlife at this location and had nearly come to the beach with only a 17-35. Luckily I’d decided otherwise and now the 270mm end of the Tamron was just what I needed.

I wasn’t too aware of what was going on behind me until the penguin had gone and I turned around to leave. It was then that I noticed that a large group of people had assembled behind me and had been photographing the penguins as well. One was a fellow photographer from my group who had, unfortunately, come to the beach with only a 60mm prime lens. He’d made do and gotten some nice shots but he certainly didn’t have as many options available to him as I had.

Here are a couple of shots — first, just as the penguin re-emerged after walking behind a large rock:

That shot’s cropped a bit, but it’s sharp enough to handle it. I mainly cropped it to get rid of some distracting gull poo in the foreground. Proof that you can’t control everything in the scene. The next shot is closer to full frame but is also cropped a small amount just to get rid of some visual noise around the edge of the frame and also to show the penguin a bit better at the small size required by this blog template:

I don’t generally like to crop photos after they are shot. Coming from a background of shooting transparency, I learned to crop in-camera. It was a necessity. I’m only recently embracing the ability to crop and re-frame images in Lightroom or Photoshop. Files captured by modern DSLRs are now large enough that there is some lee-way. You can crop an image down a bit and still have a reasonably large file that will be viable as a stock image. I continue prefer to “get it right” in-camera whenever possible, but it has become a welcome byproduct of digital photography that I can now tweak an image’s crop later to make it stronger. Especially in situations like this where time was limited and I wasn’t able to reposition myself or to get closer just to eliminate some distracting element in the foreground or background.

Operation Albatross

[sponsored post]

The next posts will explore the Otago Peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island. Dunedin is located where the peninsula joins the mainland and at the far tip of the peninsula is the Royal Albatross Centre, where I was to play wildlife photographer for the afternoon and try and get at least one decent shot of a Royal Albatross. I say “play” at being a wildlife photographer because I have the utmost respect for photographers who specialize in this field and I know that my infrequent dabbles of an hour or two don’t even come close to the kind of commitment, stamina and determination that it actually takes to get a really beautiful wildlife shot.

The Royal Albatross is listed as an endangered species and Taiaroa Head, where the Royal Albatross Centre is located, is the only mainland breeding colony near human occupation. These are large birds with wingspans reaching 10 feet. They live mainly at sea, coming to land pretty much just to lay eggs and raise their young. If I remember correctly, I believe our guide said that they don’t visit land at all for the first five years of life.

The image above is not of an albatross colony, but of a group of Red Billed Gulls. These birds covered the hillside as we approached the Royal Albatross Centre and gave hope that our search for an albatross might be an easy one. Not that easy, we would come to learn. The Centre is a fantastic place for learning about the albatross and other regional wildlife, but as is usually the case with wildlife, some days are always better than others for viewing wild birds in their natural habitat. A good hike up a steep slope to a viewing area that had been made from a WWII bunker led to this view of our first albatross through some very scratched plexiglass:

Yeah.

That white shape on the left is a nesting albatross. The birds were just returning for the beginning of their nesting season but they were still few and far between. This was the only one we could spot and it was pretty clear that this was not going to be the way I was going to get my albatross shot today. Luckily there was a part two to this excursion and we next made our way to the Monarch and out into the Pacific.

I’ve been on a few boats like this for various whale-watching trips, etc., and I’ve learned a couple of things about shooting from them. One, take the longest glass you have because you’ll never be as close as you want (although the optimist in me tells me to keep a second body around my neck with a wide angle just in case we have a freak encounter and a whale pops up right next to the boat). Birds only enhance the requirement for long glass as I learned one long winter’s night in a blind on the Platte River in central Nebraska — but that’s another story. Lesson two, be prepared for a bumpy ride.

And today’s ride was a bit bumpy. Or maybe “rocky” and “roll-y” is a more apt description. Once out on the big water, our little boat was riding 9 foot swells like a Coney Island roller coaster. I tried to capture these swells in a photo, with limited success:

You can kind of see the sharp foreground swell with another, more distant, swell out-of-focus in the distance but you really can’t decipher it without some sense of scale. Oh well, trying to photograph that occupied my time until the albatross was spotted.

There had been a couple of sightings earlier that were more distant and it seemed that the birds were always moving away from us but, this time, I heard the captain say that there was an albatross on my side of the boat and he was coming toward us.

I had positioned myself in a narrow walkway on the side of the boat where I could push my lower back against a wall and have a foot out forward against the rail to give me some stability with my hands free. “Some” stability. Remember that we’re diving over swell after swell and anything put on a flat surface wouldn’t stay put for a second. I had also tried to reduce my top-heaviness by not bringing the full backpack. I’m primarily relying on my Nikon D7000 and the Tamron 18-270mm zoom. At the 270 end, it’s the largest glass I carry — the next closest being my Nikkor 80-200. With the smaller sensor of the D7000, the Tamron is the approximate equivalent of a 400mm lens. A true bird photographer would probably consider this to be just barely enough but it was all I had and I was making the most of it. I also appreciated the Tamron’s compactness and low weight. Hand-holding a fast, 400mm prime lens with all the weight that a fast lens brings would have been a challenge. The Tamron isn’t as fast as my 2.8 Nikkor, but I made up for this by increasing my ISO to 800 to get some of the shutter speed back that I was losing to a slower lens. At ISO 800, I was able to get a shutter speed of 1/2500th of a second at f/6.3. And that did the trick. It gave me a fast enough shutter to overcome the rocking of the boat and — maybe I forgot to mention this — the potential 75mph speed that the bird can achieve.

The Albatross appeared over a swell and, as predicted, headed toward us and slowly arced his path across the back of the boat. As it approached, I fired off several shots — trying to regain auto-focus a couple of times throughout the burst, just to make sure I’d get something sharp. This was another lesson I’d learned on a whale-watching excursion when a fluke appeared, beautifully backlit, and my autofocus slipped off and grabbed the background as the boat rocked and I ended up with a bunch of useless images of a fuzzy whale tail with a tack-sharp cliff in the background. Lesson learned.

This time I tried to concentrate on following the bird’s path and fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire, re-check focus, fire-fire-fire… and then… that was it. We had a couple more albatross sightings but none quite that close. Thanks to the Tamron 18-270, this albatross had been close enough that I got a few shots like these — the first only lightly cropped to straighten the horizon and the second cropped a bit more:

I’m not typically selling to a wildlife market. For my purposes, I just really want to have images in the file that help tell the story of a place. These albatross shots show the bird and a bit of the environment. That works. If someone needs a shot of a nest, eggs hatching, etc., I’m glad to leave that sale to the wildlife guys that have the patience to get those shots. It takes a lot of work on their part and I know I’m not going to compete with their images with what I get on a 2-hour boat trip. Still, I’m happy to have gotten the shots that I did and it was a great day to be out on the water enjoying this beautiful place. The Otago Peninsula is absolutely magnificent and I could have easily spent weeks there. Unfortunately, I only had a couple of days this time. I’ll show you more of those two days in the coming posts — as well as another spot where the Tamron saved me on a wildlife surprise.

Tamron 18-270mm lens

[sponsored post]

I recently had an opportunity to try out the Tamron 18-270mm zoom lens on a shoot in Louisiana (The full name of this lens is the Tamron 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 Di II VC PZD). The shot above is of downtown Baton Rouge, taken from the 27th floor observation deck of the State Capitol Building. That’s the wide end of the lens — 18mm. Now check this out:

That’s the Huey Long statue on the Capitol grounds shot from the same spot with the lens zoomed all the way to 270mm. These were taken my Nikon D7000 so, given the cropped sensor, the zoom range would be the equivalent of 27mm to a little over 400mm on a full-frame DSLR (Tamron Di II lenses are not built for full-frame sensors, however. Their Di lenses are the full-frame models). That’s pretty significant coverage. And it’s small — less than a pound and it takes 62mm filters.

To a travel photographer, the idea of having one lens that does everything while being lightweight and compact… well… that’s pretty appealing. Of course, you can’t have it all. No one lens can do everything. But this one does a lot.

There are shooting situations that require that you “go light” and not take all your gear. An example might be a day out in a kayak. You don’t have space to take a lot with you and it might be inconvenient — if not dangerous — to try and change lenses while out on the water. That’s where I see a lens like this really shining. It would get you through almost any situation you might encounter from wide shots of your companion kayakers that show the surrounding scenery, to tight telephoto shots of wildlife that might appear with little warning.

To achieve a zoom range like this and to keep the lens light, you need to give up some speed and the Tamron 18-270 is an f/3.5-6.3. Almost everything I carry is f/2.8 or faster so this might seem slow — especially if you’re hand-holding it and shooting telephoto — but the 18-270 does have very capable stabilization and — let’s face it — with today’s DSLRs it’s no longer such a big deal to crank up the ISO a little.

As another example of the Tamron’s range and the creative potential that it brings: here are two shots from the reverse view of those at the top of this post. These are taken from behind the Huey Long statue, looking back up at the Louisiana State Capitol Building (Long was instrumental in its construction, by the way, and was assassinated inside it). I took a few steps in between these two images but they are shot from more or less the same position. The shot on the left at 18mm (27mm equivalent) and the one on the right at 270mm (400+).

I shot a lot with this lens while on my Louisiana road trip and will share more images later. The Tamron 18-270 impressed me enough that it’s earned a place in my bag when I go to New Zealand next month. Then we’ll really see what she can do.