Upde Designs

Happy Thursday!

I have three images from my trip to the river on Tuesday.  This is something you don’t see every day, one tug boat pushing another tug boat.  I’m not sure if the first one is not working or they are just saving money by piggy backing it back to their home port.

All the years I have lived in Dubuque and all the many times I’ve been to the river I never realized this staging area existed.  I had to walk a fair distance to find it and the only reason I found it was as I was photographing the old iron bridge I notice a large tug boat heading to what looked like the shore only to disappear out of sight.

So I had to investigate and I found this staging area where they assemble barges for the trip up and down the river.  I’ll pay more attention to this place in the future.

You can click on this image to make it larger and if you do pay attention to the big river boat in the distant background.  I’ll explain why in the next image.

I am an admitted gear head and somewhat of a lazy photographer.  Meaning I don’t normally like to hike very far to get a picture.

So a few weeks ago Tamron® announced the release of a new lens that was described as an “Ultra Zoom.”  It is an 18 – 400 mm lens for “cropped sensor” camera bodies.  When I put it on my D500 (which is a cropped sensor camera) the lens becomes a 27 – 600 mm lens (with the 1.5 times crop factor.)  I took this image standing in the exact same spot as the second image in this series.  Additionally there was no cropping of this image.

I have not made a lot of images with it but I do know that it is not the sharpest lens at 600 mm.  However if you only want to carry one lens and be able to handle a variety of shooting opportunities, it is the perfect lens.  Considering the range you get with this lens it is remarkably inexpensive.

Enjoy your day and be careful.