Yes, “A057X” is cryptic, but my new lens’s official monicker is “150-500mm F/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD” so let’s stick with that part number. It’s from Tamron and this is the Fujifilm X-Mount variation. Lens-geeking is my favorite part of photo-geeking and it’s great that more manufacturers are opening up to third-party lens builders.

Last May I wrote that I wanted a big-ass super-telephoto and now I have one. Let’s start with a little comparo. Here is (roughly) the same 2km-away landscape shot on the decades-old Tokina 400mm I’d been using since 2009, and on the new Tamron.

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If you care about this sort of thing you might want to enlarge these. A person is visible in the bottom picture, and another if you’re using Lightroom on a 4K screen.

Now let’s be honest; the color and flavor of the earlier picture is nicer, because the sun was just right; that’s why I strapped on the old glass. But the new-lens picture shows that yes, we do still make progress in analog technologies, and given the same light, there’d be more you could do with with today’s lens.

Anyhow, here’s what it looks like.

That’s on a Fujifilm X-T2, one of the bulkier of Fuji’s X-cameras. What’s not instantly obvious is that the camera and lens are sitting on the lens’s tripod shoe. That camera is now eight years old and needs to be replaced, but I’m not fully won over by the latest X-cams and the lens was an easier trigger to pull.

The reviews all said “Considering what it does, it’s amazingly small and light!” Maybe, but in fact it’s a big freakin’ heavy hunk of metal and glass. A tripod really helps.

For the birds · Tripod? But everyone seems to think that this kind of lens is for shooting birds in flight. So I took it to our cabin this weekend to test that hypothesis. Thus I learned that you really can’t shoot birds unless you’re hand-holding the camera. And even then, you can’t unless you’ve been practicing. I managed to get one picture of a bird in flight, but it was just a seagull and not a terribly handsome one either.

Then a couple of visitors settled at the top of a nearby Douglas Fir. Here’s one. Yes, the sky was that blue.

Isn’t it handsome? If you look close, though, its tail is jammed against a branch. But then it bent over to peer out at something.

Aren’t those feathers beautiful? This was a big-ass tree and I wasn’t right next to it, either. Yay Tamron.

Little, big · Turns out this thing can focus relatively close-in for an item of its ilk, so you can do, um what would one call it, macro-at-a-distance?

That’s a teeny little blossom. But when I’m looking out over the water, I always end up taking pictures of the mountains on the other side.

That one is a damn long way away. The picture suffers from being reduced to fit into your browser. I wish I could give everyone in the world Lightroom and a good 4K monitor.

Note that… · None of the pictures via this lens could have been captured on any mobile-phone camera in the world. You have to go pretty far these days to get into that territory.