As photographers who want to excel and make unique travel imagery, we should be able to consistently create images that stand apart from everyone else’s work. When the whole world is photographing Taj Mahal, we should be searching the streets of Agra for the kite-makers who create unique designs. When every tourist is photographing the scenic backwaters of Kerala, we should go searching for the boat makers who craft these beautiful floating houses, or the farmers who grow paddy by creating embankments that keep the water away. The cutting edge of travel photography is in creating images that few people make, and few people even think about making.
But how do we go in search of such subjects and situations? One of the answers is in relying on local knowledge.
Do have a look at this image of a Bishnoi woman near Jodhpur with her granddaughter. This photograph was made inside her one-room house. How did I get access to her house and how did she permit me to make this photographs? How could I get her to stand in a location with a very interesting light?
Introduction.
The Tamron 24-70 f2.8 is the first lens in this zoom range to have Vibration Control. It comes with several high quality glass elements to deliver sharp, problem free images. The lens has variable length and has a wide open aperture of 2.8 throughout the zoom range. The other important feature is an ultrasonic drive for silent, fast and accurate autofocus. The lens comes with full-time manual focus.
Build
The Tamron 24-70 f2.8 VC feels sturdy with just the right amount of weight (825gm). Mounted on a 5D MarkII, the shape and weight are an ideal composition for getting shake-free images at low shutter speeds. The surface of the lens feels a little plasticky, but is not much of a concern. The zoom ring is slightly harder to operate, which sometimes doesn’t allow you to quickly get ready to compose a shot.
The things that I would really like to see change in the build for Canon mounts is the direction of the rotating elements. The zoom ring and manual focus ring operate as left hand screws, which can be confusing and take time to get used to. Similarly, a zoon ring located towards the camera rather than towards the filter side of the lens would have made the handling easier and seamless.
The filter dia is 82mm. It would have been more convenient if Tamron designers could come up with 77mm threads, which would have made it easy to use one set of filters interchangeable with many lenses.
I spent a week traversing the highlands of Ladakh in last winter. When we were on the way to Pangong Lake, we stopped for a while at an ice field formed on either side of a gently flowing stream. The place looked beautiful, with a large patch of ice covering the ground and often forming curious patterns created from trapped air bubbles, flowing water or brown grass sticking out from the solid surface of ice. On either side of the stream, melting ice trickled gently into water from the ice bed, allowing icicles to form. Along with the distant mountains covered in snow, the patterns in the ice and the flowing water offered excellent photography opportunities. So, our short stop extended for more than 30 minutes.
Here is one of the many images made at the ice field. I was so delighted and so happy to see the beauty of this place, that I felt it was worth my money on the trip, even if we did not make it to Pangong. Of course, we reached Pangong Tso in the next few hours, after many photo-stops on the way.
Somewhere in the process of admiring the icicles and photographing them, I got carried away and lied down on the ice for a few minutes to get that perfect image that I had created in my mind. Our outspoken driver Angchuk and the sober cook Norbu found this very amusing. For rest of the tour, they would tease me whenever we found ice-fields along the way, asking me if we should stop the car for and let me lie down.