Today I shot a photo of my cat Shyna with my Tamron 70-300 lens. It’s usually the lens that I use when I try to take photos of birds outside, but I noticed several times that it also can be very well used to take portraits. My cat did sleep in her small basket and I thought it would make a great photo, but she noticed it and woke up, but I like the photo anyway. I applied one of the filters in Analog Efex Pro 2, you can get it bundled with other cool preset tools if you download the free Google Nik Collection that you should definitely try out.
Diary of Dennis 
[ Smiles ] Shyna is an adorable cat!
Yes, she is 🙂
What do you think of the lens? They make one for my camera, too and I’ve been wondering I’m not thrilled with my long lens.
I am not unhappy with the lens, but it must be mentioned that I never used any 300mm zoom lens equivalents of Sigma or Nikon, so that I have no comparison. So, be careful with what I am saying here. I could compare it with my Nikon 18-105mm but they are on par with sharpness. I love the Tamron image stabilization (they call it VC, vibration reduction), it’s really freezing the image in the viewfinder when you use VC. The auto-focus is fast for my taste, and silent. Up to 200mm it’s a very sharp lens, up to 300mm it’s less sharp but I still shot most of my bird photos at 300mm anyway because for me reach is more important. When I have to crop a 300mm picture in post, it happens that I find chromatic aberration but only if I cropped heavily. Since almost all my bird photos are taken with the 70-300mm Tamron lens, you can browse here and see for yourself what you think: https://diaryofdennis.com/tag/birds/
Since I own the Nikon 50mm 1.8G, I definitely know that it can be sharper, but I think that is an unfair comparison because this would be basically a prime lens and a 50mm that is known to be very sharp if stopped down. I’d say I am very pleased with the Tamron lens when it’s summer and spring, because then I can use it at f/8 or at f/11 where it becomes sharper. In the dark Northern German autumns and winters, I need to compensate settings and have less freedom then. Many reviewers said you should think the Tamron 70-300mm is a 70-200mm lens. So, if I need 300mm reach and the weather is dark, it can get me into the less sharp territory if I am forced to f/5.6. But same applies for my 18-105mm Nikon lens, and with dark weather image quality suffers because of higher ISO anyway. About the Tamron, I’d agree with reviewers that it’s less sharp after 200mm, but I still think the reviewers are hunting for issues and compare it with their experiences of prime lenses. What they say might be concerning for people who want to print large pictures, but what do I do? I use the images in the web and resize them to 1200px or 1000px width anyway on my blog. Apart from that, I did even crop most of my 300mm photos, and they are still not super unsharp.
When I remember right, I got the lens for around 300€ and I used this lens heavily up to this day. For the price it really did the job to keep me busy 🙂 I don’t want to sell the lens, although I’d be interested to test Sigma or Nikon equivalent lenses (out of curiosity and to see which one is better), but in the shop it’s hard to test, and I am not interested to purchase or rent them to just satisfy my curiosity 😀
I am in the market for another long lens, but then it would be the Sigma or Tamron 300-600mm lenses, or the Nikon 200-500mm… but only to get even more reach. I am not so interested to swap my 70-300mm lens. Because I am not sure what to expect from the other brands, or because I am not sure if I can get it any sharper, despite of what reviewers say… I think to get it really sharper, I’d need to purchase a 300mm prime lens. I think zoom lenses are just less sharp at the long end because they need to fit all needs.
All in all, I am not in the situation to be able to suggest you the Tamron lens, because to really be able to do that, I’d need to know the Sigma or Nikon equivalents. I can only say that this lens allowed me to try bird photography even if I sometimes still have to crop… but I had a lot of fun with this lens. 🙂