I’m sure like most people with a camera from the Sony A7 range and a appetite for manual focus lenses, I have been looking for the perfect ‘walkaround’ do it all lens. I’ve used a lot of manual lenses over the last few years on a Sony NEX 5N (now sold), A6000 and Sony A7. One of the issues with the 5N and A6000 was that most manual focus walkaround zoom lenses – designed for standard 35mm cameras – lost their wide end on those crop sensors. Sony’s A7 full frame sensor gives manual lens enthuasiasts the true focal range of old lenses back and makes the options available a lot more viable for most shooters.<\/p>\n
However, most people don’t rate old zooms very highly and the better ones tend to offer a short focal range, not great for a true walkaround, or don’t start that wide. There is a third way, offering modern aspherical and low dispersion elements whilst retaining manual focus and aperture rings: step forward early Nikon and Pentax mount lenses. This offers a range of lenses starting at 24mm and ending at various points between 100-200mm. The lens that I picked up last year – the Tamron SP 24-135mm f3.5-5.6 AD IF Aspherical offers a lot of technology, a great range, focuses down to 0.4m (maximum magnification of 1:3.3 @135mm) and is reasonably compact (530g, 81x79mm extending when zoomed).<\/p>\n
The optical construction consists of 14 elements in 10 groups including four hybrid asphericals and one AD (Anomalous Dispersion<\/i>) element. The filter size is 72mm and the lens should come with a dedicated petal-type hood and soft case. I got my mint and boxed copy for just \u00a390 on eBay, which I believe offers great value.<\/p>\n
Now, the range is great, it offers a decent macro option and has plenty of modern optical technology and it’s cheap to buy, so is it any good?<\/p>\n
I think so. I haven’t done any lens testing – who knows, maybe one day I will – but others have<\/a> (crop sensor) – full frame test here<\/a>) and it does OK. All I have to go by are the images I have shot with the lens – and I’ve been impressed with a lot of them. You can see my full Flickr gallery below.<\/p>\n [flickr_set id=”72157661260202464″]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m sure like most people with a camera from the Sony A7 range and a appetite for manual focus lenses, I have been looking for the perfect ‘walkaround’…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,5],"tags":[26],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":805,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions\/805"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/themanualphotographer.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}