In an effort to test out my new Tamron lenses, and irrespective of the fact it was raining and very windy, I decided to head out to my local bushland, Georges Head, and put the Tamron 150-500mm lens through its paces.
However, given the very high winds and the full 500mm extension, I was expecting to capture very little that would be worthwhile, but upon arriving back home and checking the results, I was truly surprised and delighted with the results.
I recently had a bad experience in the NSW Outback with high winds ruining most of the images I took with the Sony 200-600mm lens. I put it down to the fact I used a too slow shutter speed, and my inability to keep the lens steady enough on the 600mm shots in the very gusty winds.
Having decided that the Sony 200-600mm lens was a mistake for me, I decided to sacrifice the extra reach and go for the more compact Tamron 150-500mm lens, without sacrificing performance. So this shoot was to show me if I had made a huge mistake, or the right call. Thankfully, it was the right call because today was even windier than my time in the outback, and this lens has produced so many keeps today that I am totally amazed.
While these are not the world’s most colourful birds, I was fortunate enough to stumble on a mother feeding her child what looked like salmon. I was shooting up into a tree with lots of backlighting from the very overcast sky. The Sony A7R IV was more than capable of capturing the detail in both the bright and dark areas, allowing me to open it up in Catpure One to bring out the detail of the birds.
All of these images were shot on high ISO settings of around 1600 ISO, and processed through DXO Photolab for Prime Noise Reduction only, saved as DNG files, and then final processing in Capture One. This is the best way to produce clean, sharp images from higher ISO images.
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