I got hold of a Nikon mount for my Tamron lenses just over a week ago and tried taking some photos last weekend. I tried my 60-300mm f3.8-5.4 SP and my original 80-210mm f3.8-4 with and without doubler to see how practical it would be to use a totally manual lens on a digital camera.

First impressions were that it seemed a lot harder to hand hold a stable image than it had been when using film, but that could have been down to exposure settings. Also, there will be a degree of guess and bracketing to get the correct exposure. I managed to get shots which were correctly exposed, but to be honest, I was disappointed with the image quality. The shots seemed very soft and not as sharp as I had been used to getting using the lens on my film camera.

I didn’t get back to looking at it until yesterday afternoon, when I put my 80-210mm lens on my camera on a tripod and shot some flowers and a magpie in the garden. The images were a lot better, but still softer than I would have liked. The magpie was shot at 210mm which is equivalent to 315mm on a 35mm camera. I really needed to repeat this with the other lens (60-300mm) that I had used more recently, but the weather hasn’t been good this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow.