Thought it’d be a good time to show some street portrait photos I took last week, just strolling around in Kathmandu for a few hours. All shot with my Tamron SP DI 90 mm f/2.8 lens at wide open aperture, f/2.8. I’ll review the lens in some detail here.

Interestingly, it was the only non-Canon lens to make it onto the Top20 Canon (compatible) lenses in a recent photographer survey (Bob Atkins’), where it was rated “very good” to “outstanding. I’d have to agree! Here’s why:

Since I upgraded my camera from a crop version (the Canon 20D) to a full frame (the Canon 5D Mark II), I’ve become much more happy with the Tamron 90 mm lens. Honestly, it was a bit tricky to work with on the 20D. The 90 mm focal length, in effect, turned into a (90×1.6=) 144 mm lens. At that focal length, and without any image stabilization, I had to shoot at a shutter time of 1/180, 1/250 or even 1/350 sec. to avoid motion blur. And shooting at 144 mm f/2.8 gives you a very narrow focus are (DOF) so I was usually shooting at f/5.6 or so, just to make sure I got something in focus! On the 20D, I could reasonably go up to 400 or 800 ISO, which all meant that I needed daylight conditions to work – or a strobe or a tripod.

But, with the full frame 5D2 camera, it is much easier to work with! The 90 mm remains 90 mm, shutter speed of 1/125 is sufficient and if need be, I’ll crank the ISO up to 1000 ASA or above! What a dream! Dark alleys at dusk, no problem. Indoor low-light portraits, bring‘em on!

The narrow DOF is still something to consider. You’ll need to shoot your subjects fairly straight-on if you want both their eyes in focus. On the below shot of a smoking Nepalese man, you can see on the 100% crop of his eyes that only one of them is in focus. If you can’t get both eyes in focus, remember, always focus on the nearest eye.

On the next shot of the working ladies, you can get an impression of the bokeh of the Tamron 90 mm lens. (The out-of-focus points that become big circles in the back, upper-right corner.) Look at the 100% crop and tell me, isn’t it just a totally decent bokeh?

Bokeh is always a subject of heated debate among photographers. But to me it looks pretty good. On low-quality lenses you’ll often see hard rings around the edge of these out-of-focus circles. There’s still a bit of that here, but not much. And also, being in the corner of the frame, a lot of other lenses distort the circles into tear-drop shapes or so. Here, on the Tamron 90 mm lens, they remain nicely round!

So what’s the price of this lens and what are the alternatives? For Canon users like myself, there’s also the much acclaimed 85/1.2 lens and the 135/2 lens. Both ‘L’ lenses and both somewhat more expensive (especially considering I got my Tamron 90/2.8 for free!). They’re all good for shooting one thing: Portraits. Perhaps a few other niches, like food photography and macro photography. Some notable stock shooters tend to love these lenses. The two L-lenses are probably both a bit sharper and with a bit more contrast than the Tamron. But we’re really down in the nitty-gritty here. The Tamron performs excellent and personally I would probably find it hard to make good use of the more narrow DOF on these two alternative lenses, used wide open. I love the separation that the out-of-focus backgrounds give, but I still want the eyes to be in-focus. Both iris and eye-lashes, please. So the Tamron 90 mm f/2.8 is a pretty good fit for my needs. Here are the prices, served by Amazon:

Last photo here, a vertical half-body portrait of an old man in a temple. Not much to say. Just love his t-shirt!