Lens Upgrade: Tamron 18-400mm to Tamron 150-600mm Comparison

 This year has been a great first year of real wildlife photography. I say "real" because before this year, I mainly only used my phone to take pictures, meaning any photos I took of wildlife from any distance at all were blurry. I started using my EOS Canon Rebel T3 in March of this year and immediately noticed an improvement, but I was still frustrated trying to take pictures of wildlife from far away, using the Canon 18-55mm wide angle lens. I started talking to other wildlife photographers around this time too, and I realized I was going to have to upgrade my lens to a telephoto lens, for extra zoom. I chose the Tamron 18-400mm. I did a post about that, linked here. The Tamron 18-400mm has been on my camera since then, as my main wildlife lens. Towards the beginning of December though, I started researching for a longer lens. I chose the Tamron 150-600mm lens, which I ordered off of mpb.com My problem with the 18-400mm was it's limited zoom. I just couldn't get sharp enough photos of any bird more than 50 feet away. My new lens arrived over Winter break. Here is a size comparison I did of my three lenses I now own.

                                         ...And here they are again, now fully extended...

Not only am I happy with my new 150-600mm lens because of it's zoom, but I also like how professional it looks, compared to my 18-400mm. There are a few drawbacks to having a longer lens. The main one is the lenses' lack of focal range: it was nice using a lens that can take landscape photos one moment, and then zoom in to take wildlife shots the next. The new lens is also significantly heavier than my old one, and I can't fit it in my backpack.

I was very curious to see what the difference was between the max zoom on my old lens (400mm) vs my new one (600mm). Here are some comparisons between 400mm zoom, and 600mm zoom, taken out of the windows of my house...

                                     400mm                                                                   600mm

                                      400mm                                                                 600mm

Overall, the new lens will make my wildlife photos this spring much more high quality. I'm looking forward to 2023 being a sharper wildlife photo year.