Purchasing Tamron 28-75MM F2.8

Now that I've learned a bit more about DSLR and lenses, I simply can't resist shopping for a better lens for my T3i. As I shoot mostly indoor and I love those beautiful portrait photos, I wanted a lens with longer zoom and faster aperture. I don't really like to use flash because even if I bounce it and I actually use a bounce card backward (I used the black part) to keep the flash from flashing directly or near the eyes, it's still pretty uncomfortable and I honestly do not want to subject my daughter to the discomfort. And so began my search for the near perfect camera. I actually went through a couple of lens before decided on it but I'll talk about that in another blog.

To make it short, I settled on Tamron 28-75mm f2.8. It has a constant f2.8, which is fantastic and one of the reason I didn't choose Sigma's 17-70mm. Plus, I like the extra 5mm and don't really need the wider range. The problem is that it seems that it's quite common to get a "bad" copy of the lens. I really dreaded that because Indonesia's return policy is non-existent. But the photos I saw in the Tamron 28-75mm's flickr group is gorgeous and the review of the lens is generally good. So I decided to give it a try.

The main complaint about the lens from what I've read is that front and back focus problem so I went to the camera store prepared with a focus test chart I downloaded from here: http://www.focustestchart.com/chart.html

I conducted the test without a tripod and without the perfect lighting, but I wasn't too concern about it. I'm not looking for a tack sharp enough but just tested to see that it can focus where it's supposed to focus.

The results seemed to be quite good:

I also took a couple of random test at different zoom range:

So all seemed satisfactory and I bought the lens and brought it home. I'm really loving it. I think I've found my near perfect lens.