Gasp! another lens..?

So I am heading out in a couple of weeks as one of the chaperones for a church youth pilgrimage to Taizé, a monastery in Burgundy in France, and on the way we will be spending a couple of whirlwind days sightseeing in Paris. I am going partly as chaperone, and partly as photojournalist to document the trip, and so I was trying to decide what gear to take… The body was a no-brainer: the incredibly versatile Sony A7Riv with all it’s 61MP goodness, but the lenses were another matter! While I would love to take a whole suitcase of my beloved Russian and Japanese vintage prime glass, I really need to travel light, and most of the shooting is going to really be of the run’n’gun type (I’m actually not even sure I will take a tripod), so I think I will have to limit myself to the bare minimum. I have been using the great Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 as a workhorse lens pretty much ever since I made the jump to Sony from Canon, and my amazing (and incredibly generous!) wife Jackie got me the matching 70-180 f/2.8 for Christmas, so that is the mid and telephoto covered, but at the wide end I am lacking, and for sightseeing and the French countryside I really needed a wide zoom as well.

The obvious choice was to complete the Tamron set and get their very well reviewed 17-28 f/2.8, but after doing a ton of research (and watching this video in particular) I decided to try and find a used copy of an older, slightly slower lens that would be more versatile- the Sony Zeiss 16-35 f/4. I figured that with the built-in image-stabilization (that works along with that built into the Sony bodies) and the fact that I could easily switch to the 28-75 if I needed the speed (that kind of speed is much less needed on a wide lens), along with the extra mm at both ends, this would be a good choice. The A7Riv will jump to crop-sensor equivalent (x1.5, so this lens becomes a useful 24-52mm) at the touch of a button, and while the 61MP drops to 24MP that is still pretty darn good, so this makes it an excellent walk-around, sightseeing lens. And because this is an older lens (it came out in 2014), there are lots of good copies available on the used market. And after a bit of searching I found a good copy (honestly, I can’t find any evidence of use on it) on eBay from a camera store in Texas for less than half the price of the Tamron 🙂

It arrived a couple of days ago, but I’ve been quite busy, so today I got to take it out to the woods on a mostly-grey-but-occasionally-sunny day to see if I would regret my choice- and I have to say, I’m very happy with my decision 🙂 Autofocus is not a crucial with a wide as with a telephoto, but you certainly get the best of all possible worlds putting a Sony lens on a Sony body- the Tamrons are great, but this is just a little bit better. I tried to get a variety of shots to simulate the sort of shooting I hope to be doing in France, and it handled all of it with aplomb! I was a little worried about the lack of bokeh with a slower lens, but this is OK, and the quality of it is quite nice.

I think this will be on my camera a lot in France, and with the two Tamrons I have will allow me to travel light but cover all the bases- though I may try and sneak one vintage prime along in the bottom of my suitcase 😉