Review on Tamron A012N SP 15-30mm F2.8 Di VC USD Ultra-Wide-Angle Zoom Lens for Nikon FX Camera - International Version | No Warranty by Josh Gerhardt

I recently vacationed at Disney World with my family and needed a good all round lens to take good pictures during my stay. I'm 24 years old and a software developer, not a 'real' photographer, so I tend towards a combination of technical features and ease of use. I have a Nikon D800 and a Tamron 28-75, but with slow autofocus, no image stabilization and what I consider a narrow wide angle, I'm considering getting an ultra wide angle zoom. Spec reviews online rank it at the top of the scale in terms of sharpness, and there's no competition in terms of image quality at this price point. Tamron used to be an unnamed brand, but like Sigma, they've stepped up their game over the past 5-10 years. Mechanically, the zoom ring is a bit stiffer than we'd like, and the focus ring turns almost too easily. It's actually pretty easy to bump the focus ring after auto-focusing and lose focus due to a permanent lock that can't be turned off. The front panel comes in and out so the fixed hood is always the right size, which is pretty neat. The whole lens is heavy for an ultra wide angle and wide angle. The front element is convex, so conventional filters cannot be placed on it. That's probably fine, but it would be great to be able to adjust NDF for this, as ultra-wide is excellent for long exposure images. The image stabilization works great: I've got some usable 3 second shots that I took handheld. This lens is almost comically large. It's quite heavy and I wouldn't want to carry it on a strap all day with a full frame camera. Instead, I wore it with a fabric belt and belt clip. It took six days before I started getting red spots, so I call it a success. The optics are just great. Vignetting when fully open. There is also moderate distortion across the width. Both can easily be corrected afterwards, so I don't count them with this lens. If you are using a D700 or other lower resolution camera then you can make these fixes as you lose resolution. The shine is almost non-existent. If you really try hard you can get a tiny detached coma-like rainbow, but this is by far the least glare lens I have. The usability is good, but could be a little better. Of course, being so big and heavy has its downsides. The autofocus is super fast. It was just chasing focus when I was in such darkness when you set your camera to ISO 12,800 and EV-2, which isn't a sensible situation for your camera. 15-30mm is a small range but great for landscape photography and covers a lot of everyday people photography. At f/2.8 you can still get great backgrounds at 30mm, comparable to popular 35mm lenses. The lens is too big to use the built in flash which burned me a few times. In general, using the built-in flash is a bad idea, but there are a few scenarios where it can come in handy. My general opinion is that if you can handle the size of this lens, you'll enjoy the huge shots. . I've included pictures of the different scenarios I used it for the week I was at Disney World. I hope Revain doesn't compress them too much.