I often have to explain to students that camera and lens manufacturers tend to exaggerate abilities, and the students should automatically drop off, for instance, the upper two ‘factors’ of any claim that is made about their equipment. For instance, while the ISO setting in a new camera body can go all the way up to 12800 or whatever, you will typically find that useful results can only be obtained two stops or more below that, 3200 or lower, and even then it depends on the usage and how picky you are (and how much noise you want to filter out after the fact.) For things like the umpteen different names for in-lens stabilization to combat camera shake, the claim may be for up to four or six stops of improvement, but take two away from those numbers right off the bat.
Occasionally, however, such failures produce – well, not a gem, but an interesting composition nonetheless. Such as…
When a great blue heron cruised past at twilight against dark background trees, I didn’t have time to change settings on the camera and fired off in Aperture Priority at f9.0, ISO 250. The stabilization in the lens (which for the Tamron 150-600 is dubbed ‘Vibration Control’) did its best to cope with the lousy 1/4 second shutter speed, but there’s a limit, and we were well beyond that. Even had it been perfectly capable of handling my unsteadiness with a long lens for that period of time, the heron was still flapping, and how much of the camera movement was due to intentional panning? What we have is this, a ghostly blur of an image that contains two heads and two pairs of legs in there, semi-sharp, and wings in two positions as well as blurring in between. Without the VC activated, it probably would have been evenly blurred without those specific details among the bits, so, good? It has a neat, impressionistic effect, to me at least, but I can’t take credit for it at all since I wasn’t trying for anything like this. Maybe someday I’ll experiment…