Way back in the film era, Tamron came up with the idea of producing lenses that would fit any brand of camera by simply switching out the mount part of the lens. They called it the Adaptall and produced a number of lenses. My interest in vintage lenses caused my discovery of this system to pique my interest in playing with it a bit. But which lens? After watching KEH and fleabay and so on I settled on a fleabay offering that came with a Pentax adapter for a reasonable price. And since we were heading north for a few weeks I put in the bid and with no interest by others the lens wended its way to our US address and awaited our arrival. Meanwhile I’d put in an order for a Tamron-EF adapter on the big river website and as we’d recently obtained an Olympus OM-D E-M1 a Tamron-M4/3 adapter joined the equipment hoard.
Our lens is a Tamron Adaptall 2 – 28mm – f/2.5 – BBAR MC with a 49mm filter thread. It’s currently riding in a Fotasy TAM-EF adapter and is completely manual. One interesting part of this lens is that its focus meter on the barrel starts at 0.25 meters or 10 inches. Then it quickly moves up to 1.5 meters/5 feet and immediately after it shifts to infinity. So we now have a 28mm lens that should prove interesting for street photography as it SHOULD capture reasonably sharp images out past 5 foot distance with no need to look through the view finder for focusing. As I like to “shoot from the hip” or waist level while perambulating around town to catch candid images, this should work well.
However, so far I’ve only had a chance to try it for landscape. Yesterday I had to run an errand down in the Risaralda river valley and took the Canon EOS 6D along for the ride. It was mounted with the Tamron 28mm and ready to catch the beauties of this niche in the eastern slope of the western range of the Colombian Andes.
I also shot a few pics with foreground color/interest to see how the lens handles background blur. In these two images there’s not much blur, but enough to separate the flower and also give a nice look at the lovely clouds. Note the bee in the first of these two.
In the evening, back at home, we were taking the dogs for their evening park time and I saw some clouds forming to the east, and we could hear the rumbling of the thunder as a storm moved south out of the Dos Quebradas valley towards Pereira. So I grabbed the 6D which still had the 28mm Tamron on it and loaded up the dogs and my wife and drove to the top of the hill to see what we might capture. This is my favorite as you can see the dark rain clouds and the clearer skies to the east before the storm reaches that area. Buildings obstructing the view are a problem in urban settings, but this shot turned out nicely, if I do say so myself.
