| Article 1 | Article 2 | Article 3 | News | Contest | |||||
 |
|||||
|
|||||
It’s a sprint to the finish line, and Michael Campbell is there to capture the thrill of victory and the agony of “de-feet” with the Tamron 200-500mm lens (with a little help from the 70-300mm). |
|||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| SP AF200-500mm
F/5-6.3 Di & AF70-300mm F/4-5.6 Lenses by Jennifer Gidman Zumpano |
|||||
It’s been awhile since Michael Campbell has
catapulted himself over a horizontal aluminum bar. But this commercial
photographer from San Diego (a former high-jumper with the broken-wrist
memories to prove it) now has the chance to relive his competing
days through his 12-year-old son, Alex, a budding athlete who qualified
for the regional USA track-and-field championships in the high jump. |
|||||
|
Campbell recently headed to the track for the local
San Marcos Association meet, where he was a front-row bystander
to his son’s athleticism, as well as that of Alex’s
classmate, Sam, and other young participants. To help him document
the slew of sporting events that date back to ancient Greece, Campbell
brought along his Tamron SP AF200-500mm F/5-6.3 Di lens. The lens
(which Campbell also uses for fashion photography, wildlife shots,
and astrophotography) allowed him to capture every metered dash
and javelin throw of these future Carl Lewises and Jackie Joyner-Kersees. |
|||||
| Campbell has long been a fan of the Tamron lens lineup, using the Tamron 14mm for architecture and landscapes; the 90mm macro, 28-75mm F/2.8, and 28-105 F/2.8 for portraits; the 28-300mm for travel photography; and the 70-300mm telemacro for sports, outdoor headshots, and wildlife. He was equally impressed by the performance of the 200-500 at the track. “The image quality of this lens is very sharp,” he says. “And it’s a good lens for zooming in, finding your subject, and framing it very quickly.” | |||||
Your lens choice can make or break a shot your
images at a track meet, where speed is the name of the game. “I
took a shot of one little girl at 500mm when she was halfway down
the track,” he says. “The trouble with using a fixed-focus
lens is that before you know it, the person is in the wrong position.
You’ve got to capture it and grab it at exactly the right spot.
With the 200-500, you can frame your subject as they’re coming
towards you or moving away.” |
|||||
Campbell, who is known for his unique photographic
backgrounds (see www.michaelcampbell.com for
more on his work), needs the 200-500’s framing ability and super-sharp
image detail for his special “extraction” technique post-race. “Once
you start to enlarge just a small part of the image, you can lose a
lot of quality, especially with a digital camera,” he explains. “When
I’m working in my studio, I often replace the background with
some other kind of background that I’ve created previously. So
when I’m shooting, I want to frame the person very tight and
leave very little around them—when I extract the person using
Photoshop, I want as much clarity and detail as I can. I usually shoot
at around F/16 so that every single hair, every eyelash, is in focus.
It makes it a lot easier to do the extraction. Then, with retouching,
you can take out all the lines and wrinkles that no one wants to see.” |
|||||
High-Speed Shooting |
|||||
Focusing on such fast action can be challenging
in sporting events, but if you know where to look and how to preplan,
you can almost always get the shot you want. “Normally what
you do is focus right on the finish line,” Campbell explains. “You
don’t even have to look through the camera—you set
the whole thing up, have the camera in the right spot, and just
watch. You know exactly where the runner is going to be, since
they’re usually in lanes, and as soon as they get to that
place, you can just take the shot. The hardest sport I’ve
tried to photograph is polo, because you never really know which
way the horses are going to go! Suddenly they turn and start going
in the other direction—I’ve gotten lots of pictures
of the back end of a horse!” |
|||||
| The 200-500 was up to speed with the lightning-fast
competitors at his son’s track meet, says Campbell. “I
used autofocus, and for one shot I was zooming back and forth with
the runner in the middle of the frame,” he says. “She
was moving pretty fast, but the 200-500 did a good job of keeping
her in focus.” |
|||||
Another important feature of the 200-500mm lens
is its smooth movement. “I compared this lens to another manufacturer’s
170-500mm lens, so I was dealing with similar focal ranges,” Campbell
says. “Mechanically, however, the other lens was not as good
as the Tamron 200-500. The competitor sent me the 170-500 to try
out, but it was very ‘sticky.’ Instead of getting a nice,
smooth zoom, if you were following movement, it would get stuck,
you’d have to pull extra hard, and then it would jerk.” |
|||||
When Campbell called for a replacement (“I
figured it was a loaner, and that maybe it had gotten a little beat up”),
he was faced with a zoom lens with a mind all its own. “The problem
now was that the lens was almost too loose,” he says. “When
you tilted the camera up or down, the weight of the lens actually dragged
it out—it was as if the lens was zooming itself!” No such
problems with the Tamron 200-500, which performed impeccably every time. “With
the Tamron lens, you can point it up at the sky and it stays put,” he
says. |
|||||
For a special blurred effect at the track meet,
Campbell switched to the Tamron AF70-300mm F/4-5.6 macro lens. “The
70-300 came in handy when I was standing on the edge of the track and
I didn’t need such a strong telephoto lens,” he says. “It’s
a really light lens, so I could handhold it, which is good when you want
to pan along with your subject.” |
|||||
For one such shot, he didn’t even need to
pan with his runner. “I just let the runner blur as he or she ran
through, at around 1/30th of a second,” he says. “The only
thing you really see in focus is the foot, which is in contact with the
ground; the rest of the body is all just a blur of movement. You have
no idea who’s running, whether it’s a boy or a girl. It was
just a fun shot. The child running might not want that shot, but the
shoe manufacturer would probably like it!” (If you want to freeze
the action, Campbell suggests going 1/250th of a second or shorter.) |
|||||
Campbell also put the
70-300mm lens to good use when it came time to get some up-close portraits. “I took a picture of Sam’s
sister, Alexa, patiently sitting by the goalpost while Sam was training,” he
says. “I really like using the 70-300 for candids like this. I
set my Fuji S3 on 800 ISO with an aperture priority of F/5.6. Alexa adored
the picture!” |
|||||
At
the end of the day, Campbell transported home a weary sixth-grader
with one more meet under his belt. And while Alex left with the thrill
of competitive racing coursing through his blood, the elder Campbell
took away compelling photographic memories for his son’s athletic
scrapbook, thanks to the Tamron 200-500 and 70-300 lenses. |
|||||
Tip Box Surf’s Up! Isolating Your Subject While the 200-500 lens is ideal for sporting events, Campbell has also used it for shoreline shooting. “One of the first shots I took with the lens was of a swimsuit model on the beach,” he says. “However, I wanted to isolate her from tourists and other distracting elements behind her.” The 200-500mm is ideal for this type of task, according to Campbell: “The lens is so good that it can be very sharply focused on your subject, but the background will drop out of focus with a very shallow depth-of-field.” The only drawback to being able to get such a detailed image from so far away? “The only way to communicate with the model was by cell phone,” Campbell laughs. “I had her kneel in the sand; then I went up the beach and called her on the phone to say, ‘Smile!’” |
|
||||
