In praise of old lenses - Tamron 90mm macro

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In praise of old lenses - Tamron 90mm macro

Postby peterr » Thu Apr 09, 2020 2:06 pm

Although becoming a bit more difficult to find, there is still quite a lot of old glass out there that can be had at good prices and you will find that adaptors are available to fit old lenses to many modern digital cameras. There are, of course, things to watch out for in lenses that are several decades old, e.g. fungus, haze and balsam separation to name but a few. Nevertheless, lenses from the more well-known manufacturers tend to be well engineered and if the lens has been well looked after and carefully stored there is often not much to worry about apart from the odd tiny speck of internal dust which will have negligible impact on image quality.

With an old lens that is several decades old you are likely to be limited to manual focus. However with a macro lens this is not necessarily a serious limitation as manual focus is often better for precision close up photography work anyway. In fact, the focusing on a lot of the old lenses tends to be wonderfully damped and smooth and a joy to use in comparison with the manual focus setting on a modern autofocus lens.

There are lots of very good vintage macro lenses out there, but the Tamron 90mm macro lenses are generally reckoned to be up there with the very best. The early Tamron SP 90mm F2.5 versions of this lens achieved almost legendary status, but they did only provide a maximum 0.5 times magnification. Later ones came with an F2.8 maximum aperture and provided 1:1 magnification, but the very latest were mainly of plastic construction and don’t feel as reassuringly solid as the early version.

I purchased my 72B model of the Tamron 90mm macro lens secondhand about 15 years ago. This was the very last manual focus version of the lens, but it cost me less than a third of the price of the autofocus version that was available at the time. Nevertheless, the optics were just as impressive and the fact that it came with an adaptall 2 mount meant that I could easily adapt it to all of the 35mm SLR film cameras that I owned at that time. It is a lens that I used heavily when I purchased my first DSLR and it even provided me with a few of my early BCC competition winners. A newer adaptor providing fuller linkage to the exposure modes of my current DSLR has reawakened my interest in using the old Tamron and I have recently been scouring the garden looking for things to photograph. As you will see below I found nothing more interesting than tulips! I do, however, continue to be impressed by the sharpness and pleasing bokeh of this lens and a 36Megapixel full frame DSLR fails to show much in the way of shortcomings (although admittedly you will be unable to spot much anyway in the small image posted).

[Ignore the focal length shown on exif - this is the focal length I dialled in for the in-built image stabilisation rather than the focal length of the lens.]

I intend to experiment with a few more of my old lenses during the coming weeks (or months).
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peterr
 
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