Zoom ranges we wish we had

lomoapontaechuta said:

Hike Pics said:

I could probably use a 35-135 rather well. A 30-140 would be nice.

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Nikon has one, 18-140 mm for APSC

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That's 27-210, something others have already said is too wide for them.

I'm actually a generalist-- I shoot almost everything but portraits, serious action, and the more extreme kinds of wildlife like underwater and birds in flight. I'll take a stab at all three of those too (except for underwater-- no sealed gear), though if I got a good result, it would be mostly by chance. There's not much I can't photograph with a 40, 50 or 85mm prime, or just about anything in between: landscapes, people at work, flowers and plants, domestic animals, street scenes, cars and aircraft, architecture and so on. Provided I have room to move, I can make it work. If I don't have room to move, I'll give you the details and move on. I shoot jpeg only and my goal is always to create an illusion of truth.

I do have a few mild wide angle lenses- my phone clocks in at somewhere between 28 and 30mm equivalent, and I have a whole collection of toy cameras in the wide-ish range, which work for me the way an old film snapshot camera like an Instamatic works for me. But I'm not going to spend the big bucks for that experience, however much I enjoy it with a tiny sensor toy I bought for $50. My gripes with serious shooting with a wide angle involve *every single shot* I get being sloppily composed and badly needing a crop to be finished, and the nasty distortions that come when you try to focus up close. I try to pick my lenses at least in part to avoid this, and often use a macro or near macro as a walkaround lens since I shoot a lot of plants and small objects. If you like to stick your lens into your subject, a wide angle is not necessarily your friend.

I frankly never expected there to be many zooms, if any, that started at 40 or 50, though I was surprised to see only one, the Tamron, starting at 35, and that one very big, fast, heavy, and expensive. It's hardly the same kind of thing as the 70-300, and would be much more attractive to me as a smaller, less expensive lens, perhaps at f/4.

Luckily for me, all this zoom thing was was an idea, and I can go right on messing around with primes like I've been doing for the last 40 years or so.

Well. it is what I want, in a way. I want it quite a bit, actually-- it's lovely. What I don't have is the money, and probably a camera that will do it justice. Though I bet it could be made to work on my Zf-- there are CRX to Z adapters out there.

Which leads to the question of why this particular zoom range made sense to Zeiss in 1966 as a lens for the Ikon in and does not make sense to anybody now.

No the zoom ranges are covered. Now it's a matter of which body do I want to shoot with.

I wonder how I would like the Tamron at an f/4 max aperture.'cause I agree the fast one is way too big and heavy ( and expensive).

Now that I've thought about it, back in the late 70s, I had a 35-105, Soligor? I guess. Unless a consumer also 70-200 or 300 at about the same time, my first zoom. Unfortunately I seemed to get consistent under exposure, everything darker than it should be compared to other images with other lenses at the same time. At the time and most of the time I was shooting K64 and in the Navy so mail in for developing not really easy to experiment and track down just how much I needed to adjust, so it got set aside and not used much. There weren't many consumer zooms at the time. some time later, I went with a 28-105 for Minolta, 24-xx and 28-xx zooms were getting to be more available at the time.

In their post above, Ishwanu links to information about a Zeiss 40-120 from 1966. Apparently zooms of this general range were known in the past.

yardcoyote said:

Does anyone else feel that the focal length ranges of existing zoom lenses don't quite fit the way you shoot? What's your dream zoom?

Mine would be a normal to short or mid tele, 40-110mm or so. 135 would be fine too.

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Olympus 40-150/2.8

Just the ticket.

lomoapontaechuta said:

Hike Pics said:

I could probably use a 35-135 rather well. A 30-140 would be nice.

Click to expand...

Nikon has one, 18-140 mm for APSC

Click to expand...

The closest I can get for my older Sony bodies would be a 24-105mm (36-157mm) from Minolta, Sigma or Sony.

I don't think anything that close for m43, E or EF. But haven't researched a lot.

a_c_skinner said:

The Fuji 70-300 goes some way towards what I want but to get closest you need to be zoomed in. On the whole it does what I want but not quiet as much.

Nikon 70-180 goes some way too but only gets really close at 70mm.

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Your Fuji and my Tamron.

yardcoyote said:

I'm actually a generalist-- I shoot almost everything but portraits, serious action, and the more extreme kinds of wildlife like underwater and birds in flight. I'll take a stab at all three of those too (except for underwater-- no sealed gear), though if I got a good result, it would be mostly by chance. There's not much I can't photograph with a 40, 50 or 85mm prime, or just about anything in between: landscapes, people at work, flowers and plants, domestic animals, street scenes, cars and aircraft, architecture and so on. Provided I have room to move, I can make it work. If I don't have room to move, I'll give you the details and move on. I shoot jpeg only and my goal is always to create an illusion of truth.

I do have a few mild wide angle lenses- my phone clocks in at somewhere between 28 and 30mm equivalent, and I have a whole collection of toy cameras in the wide-ish range, which work for me the way an old film snapshot camera like an Instamatic works for me. But I'm not going to spend the big bucks for that experience, however much I enjoy it with a tiny sensor toy I bought for $50. My gripes with serious shooting with a wide angle involve *every single shot* I get being sloppily composed and badly needing a crop to be finished, and the nasty distortions that come when you try to focus up close. I try to pick my lenses at least in part to avoid this, and often use a macro or near macro as a walkaround lens since I shoot a lot of plants and small objects. If you like to stick your lens into your subject, a wide angle is not necessarily your friend.

I frankly never expected there to be many zooms, if any, that started at 40 or 50, though I was surprised to see only one, the Tamron, starting at 35, and that one very big, fast, heavy, and expensive. It's hardly the same kind of thing as the 70-300, and would be much more attractive to me as a smaller, less expensive lens, perhaps at f/4.

Luckily for me, all this zoom thing was was an idea, and I can go right on messing around with primes like I've been doing for the last 40 years or so.

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Thank you, I now have a better understanding of why you don't need wide. I also agree that wide angles distort. The Concorde photograph I mentioned earlier was only ever going to be possible with an extreme wide angle. I couldn't get further away, there was a blast fence behind me and I'd have got ground equipment in the way had I moved back. I was pretty much under the nose so getting the whole aircraft in meant I had to accept distortion. I had been asked to produce some images for our engineering conference rooms. A nice opportunity but I had a day job to do as well so I wasn't inclined to spend hours setting up a shot. I like to produce something "different", for me wide angles allow that.

Each to his own!

I find it strange that there are so few 35-something zooms, when 35-70 was what was available I used it and didn't yearn for wider, I had a prime for that but rarely used it. When I had 28-70, 28 was plenty wide enough. Now I have 24-70 I don't rush for the 14-24 very often, but it's nice to know it's there should I need it. I'm actually more concerned for the people who use 18-135, or longer, lenses. Too many compromises for my liking.

yardcoyote said:

Well. it is what I want, in a way. I want it quite a bit, actually-- it's lovely. What I don't have is the money, and probably a camera that will do it justice. Though I bet it could be made to work on my Zf-- there are CRX to Z adapters out there.

Which leads to the question of why this particular zoom range made sense to Zeiss in 1966 as a lens for the Ikon in and does not make sense to anybody now.

Click to expand...

In 1966 the capability to make a wide to tele zoom wasn't available, the best that could be achieved was 40-something, Nikon having produced a 43-86 three years previously. It took a while longer for 35-70 to become common, 1977 for the Nikon version. There was a 28-45 f/4.5 in 1973 and a 28-50 in 1984.

I'm no expert on optics but I suggest that the zoom ranges we are familiar with only became practical when the use of computers in lens design became more common. I don't think Nikon or Zeiss would have started making zooms with focal length ranges starting at 40mm or so had thy had the capability to start wider, the did what they considered practical at that time.

Hike Pics said:

lomoapontaechuta said:

Hike Pics said:

I could probably use a 35-135 rather well. A 30-140 would be nice.

Click to expand...

Nikon has one, 18-140 mm for APSC

Click to expand...

The closest I can get for my older Sony bodies would be a 24-105mm (36-157mm) from Minolta, Sigma or Sony.

I don't think anything that close for m43, E or EF. But haven't researched a lot.

Click to expand...

Olympus 12-100/4 for MFT is well regarded.

A

I'm finding it interesting that people are replying to suggestions by saying "Brand X has that range" without realising that the poster to whom they are replying is using a full frame camera and Brand X is M4/3.

I suggested that I would like a 20-120 f/4, nobody has, yet, suggested that Nikon has 18-105 and 18-135 lenses. Not that they would be the slightest use to me being DX lenses when I use FX cameras (Yes, I know about crop mode). Why would I buy a lens that doesn't cover the full sensor?

I'm bowing out of this one, it's getting too confusing.

Sounds to me like your image of the Concorde was a specialty item, where the wide angle distortion was part of the design. Whether that happened on purpose or not, well, photography is always surprising you.

What's funny here is that I don't even like zooms except for telephoto, where I find the sheer usefulness outweighs the ickiness of the shooting experience. The Tamron is just such a nice overall package for the price, combining very good (though obviously not impeccable) image quality with accurate autofocus and light weight for surprisingly decent balance and pointability. I hadn't realized basic zooms had gotten so good, and that got me wondering whether I could get something on a similar level for day to day use. It was fun trying to find out.

I noticed that too, of course. I shoot MFT as well and actually have access to the slow "plastic fantastic" version of the Oly 40-150 zoom for my E-M10ii. Other than being slightly longer at the short end, it's pretty much the exact analogue of the Tamron 70-300 on my FF Nikon.

I didn't have the energy to tackle that; very glad you did.

yardcoyote said:

Sounds to me like your image of the Concorde was a specialty item, where the wide angle distortion was part of the design. Whether that happened on purpose or not, well, photography is always surprising you.

What's funny here is that I don't even like zooms except for telephoto, where I find the sheer usefulness outweighs the ickiness of the shooting experience. The Tamron is just such a nice overall package for the price, combining very good (though obviously not impeccable) image quality with accurate autofocus and light weight for surprisingly decent balance and pointability. I hadn't realized basic zooms had gotten so good, and that got me wondering whether I could get something on a similar level for day to day use. It was fun trying to find out.

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It was an unusual day when we didn't have at least one spare Concorde around. When it's such a common sight there's no point in photographing it unless its unusual. When taking photographs around live aircraft it's preferable not to be changing lenses so I much prefer zooms, even 9 years after retiring.

Well, 24-120 F/4 exists (Z mount), and is one of the best midrange zooms right now.

Also existing today is the Tamron 35-150/2-2.8 (Z/E mounts), probably the best event lens ever. No need for two bodies with a fast prime, just have this one lens. Also it probably makes an excellent travel lens.

Double also existing already is a 28-400!! on Nikon Z, natively. Superzooms today are not like how they were in the past. Quite sharp everywhere, actually. Yes, it's kind of slow. There has to be a compromise somewhere. But also it's quite small, doesn't call attention to itself, and doesn't weigh 1 kilo.

Speaking of a kilo, also existing today is the tamron 50-400, F4.5! (Z/E Mounts) So, I don't know. What else would I want? I don't want to schlep 1.2 kg worth of lens anywhere of extended periods. Give me more of the super light RF 100-400 on other mounts, please.

yardcoyote said:

Does anyone else feel that the focal length ranges of existing zoom lenses don't quite fit the way you shoot? What's your dream zoom?

Mine would be a normal to short or mid tele, 40-110mm or so. 135 would be fine too.

Click to expand...

Well, I would still like something like 16-300mm for full frame (even if we're talking a slow lens) as that would mean I could pretty much take one lens with me and cover from ultra-wide to telephoto. But those only exist for APSC (which is usually translates to a 27-450mm equivalent in FF terms). So basically I'd want a FF travel zoom that goes quite wide (16mm) to at least 200mm.

sirhawkeye64 said:

yardcoyote said:

Does anyone else feel that the focal length ranges of existing zoom lenses don't quite fit the way you shoot? What's your dream zoom?

Mine would be a normal to short or mid tele, 40-110mm or so. 135 would be fine too.

Click to expand...

Well, I would still like something like 16-300mm for full frame (even if we're talking a slow lens) as that would mean I could pretty much take one lens with me and cover from ultra-wide to telephoto. But those only exist for APSC (which is usually translates to a 27-450mm equivalent in FF terms). So basically I'd want a FF travel zoom that goes quite wide (16mm) to at least 200mm.

Click to expand...

Yeah there's various 24 to whatever mm "superzooms", but I don't know anything (in either fixed lens cameras or ILC) that's wider.

Luckily nowadays there are amazing ultrawide lenses in some smartphones (which have raw supported by Lightroom), so for me it's not a very big deal.