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is very quick and the difference was barely noticeable.
Wedding photographers seeking to capture the perfect moment during the ceremony or event photographers covering a party or reception will appreciate all
of this. They’ll also appreciate the lens’s VC, a feature
I got so used to not having on my Canon 24-70mm, I
didn’t really know what I was missing. On the Tamron
24-70mm with the VC turned on, I was able to shoot at
shutter speeds two or three stops slower than normal
and still avoid motion blur in photos.
Of course, there’s full manual override for all of this.
For portraits, to ensure that close-up details such as
eyes, eyelashes and lips were extra sharp, I appreciated
the easy-to-adjust, manual-focusing ring. The same
was true for my Macro shots of flowers, fauna and insects. (It is butterfly season, after all!)
Though this lens is not really designed for Macro
work—minimum focusing distance is about 15 inches—I got some lovely close-ups with natural looking,
blurred backgrounds at f/2.8. Sure, it’s not going to
create as dramatic a look as, for instance, Tamron’s excellent 60mm f/2 Macro lens for APS-C DSLRs, the 24-
70mm is fine for close-up work of things like a bride’s
bouquet or hands during a ring ceremony.
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Photography © Shawn G. Henry
IMAGE QUALIT Y
Regarding image quality, let me first say that the
Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 is a high resolving lens. As mentioned earlier, I used it with a Canon 5D Mark III, a camera I’m more and more impressed with the more I use
it. In particular, the 5D III’s 22.3-megapixel, full-frame
CMOS sensor does a great job of capturing crisp images even at high ISOs in low light.
With the Tamron lens attached, I captured spectacular amounts of detail in my test shots. At 24mm, the
centers of my images were extremely sharp though
there was some fall-off in sharpness towards the
corners. This was disappointing in comparison to the
Canon 24-70mm lens but it still beat my results from
the Sigma 24-70mm, which suffered from noticeable
corner softening at 24mm. The Tamron lens was sharp-est at f/8 at 50mm, which is where you’ll pull the most
resolution out of the camera. ( When zooming in to 200
percent on images shot with the 5D Mark III, I saw details that I did not know were there.)
Most photographers will probably lean heavily on
the lens’s maximum f/2.8 aperture and the rounded,
9-diaphragm blades produced very nice, natural-look-ing bokeh at this f-stop. Portrait photographers will
definitely appreciate this.
I experienced very few chromatic aberrations even at
24mm when shot wide open. This is likely the result of
the lens using three LD elements to prevent fringing. All
in all, it’s a high-quality product that also utilizes three
glass molded aspherical lenses, one hybrid aspherical
lens and two XR (Extra Refractive Index) glasses.
ASMP is the premier trade association for the world’s most
respected imaging professionals.
THE BOT TOM LINE
If you can get over whatever reservations you might
have about third-party lenses, the Tamron SP 24-70mm
F/2.8 Di VC USD is definitely worth a look. It’s a well-crafted, professional-grade lens in a very popular zoom
