Taking The Tamron 150 - 600mm For A Spin

It's been awhile since I used my Tamron 150 - 600mm G1 so I decided to take it out for a spin and some fresh air on our bayside walk this morning.

The wind was howling, the wind surfers were out and about and so was the Marine Search and Rescue boat with Ambulance helicopter following behind.

I don't know if they were on a real search and rescue or a training drill because I didn't see them pull anybody out of the water while we were there.

All photos were taken hand-held.

As always, comments and feedback welcome 🙂

Nice serie.
This one is my favourite. There's storm and wind in the picture. Unfortunately there is also something else.

I guess it is AI that has destroyed the photo. Reds are spreading everywhere.
I've seen that kind of things happening when too much color noise reduction was assigned.

There's posterization in the sky. You'll need to add a little noise in the sky to avoid that!

If you did use the natural/human intelligence in the PP, the results might be better. I wonder.

Thank you TimoK 🙂

I shoot raw and use the ACR in Photoshop Elements along with the Elements XXL plugin (which gives me access to many of the full Ps features) to process and edit the raw files. The only AI processing I do is with Topaz DeNoise AI.

I don't see reds spreading everywhere on my monitor. If I zoom in to 100% I can see a tiny bit of red around the helicopter's tail "leaking" into the sky but I assume that is the effect of the hot exhaust gasses coming out the engine. The effect is more prominent near the lower middle on the left edge of the image.

How have you calibrated and profiled your monitor?

I don't see any posterization in the sky at all on my screen, even zoomed in to 100%. I see a nice smooth gradient. Feel free to download the image and circle the areas you see posterization and re-post along with the magnification you are using when you see posterization so I can take a look and see if I can replicate what you see.

As mentioned earlier, the only AI processing I used is Topaz DeNoise AI.

I certainly don't see reds spreading anywhere. Shooting over the sea or any large body water with long lenses especially is a challenge as haze is almost always a problem. The helicopter engine also generates heat adding to the unavoidable haze. On the Canon APS cameras with their 1.6x crop factor I think you di pretty good with an effective focal length of 960mm ! I especially like the two closest helicopter shots

Thank you Jim 🙂

To be honest, I surprised myself a bit with the way the photos came out at the end.

The 150 - 600mm lens is not light and even on a calm day after about 15 mins of hand holding I normally find myself reaching out for my tripod or makeshift monopod. On a calm day and at 600mm (960mm eq.) I normally set a minimum shutter seed of 1/1000s with IS turned on. That day was very windy so I set a 1/2000s min to help eliminate camera shake. Standing up would have been very difficult, if not impossible for me, to keep the subject in the OVF steady at 600mm.

Luckily for me, near the vantage point I wanted there were a couple of small bushes/shrubs. They provided a little shelter from the wind while I was down on my right knee with my left elbow on my left knee and left hand supporting the lens.

It could be camera shake as it was very windy that day and I was using 960mm eq.

The text is also directly below the spinning rotor so maybe turbulence from the down draft had some effect?

There is also a lot more direct sunlight on the helicopter in the last one. In any case, yes there is a slight difference between the two but it's not significant for me, especially given the conditions.