Two Days with the New Tamron 12-20mm f/2.8 Lens
The Tamron 12-20mm f/2.8 Di III VXD will be available in a Sony E-mount version on July 30 and in a Nikon Z-mount version on August 27. Even before its official launch, our colleague Simon Meunier had the opportunity to test it on his Sony A7IV and head out for two days to see what it was really capable of, beyond the specs on paper.
Day 1: The Val-Jalbert Historic Village
As soon as you take it out of the bag, the first thing that strikes you is how light it is. For a lens with a constant f/2.8 aperture across the entire range, I expected it to pull on my neck or take up all the space in my bag. But that’s not the case at all: it blends right into the kit without ever making me hesitate to bring it along.
The village turned out to be the perfect testing ground for it. In one of the historic houses, a dark room with a brightly lit window right next to it gave me the chance to put the autofocus through its paces under the worst possible contrast conditions. It tracked the subject without hesitation or hunting, as if the scene posed no challenge at all.
As I walked between the buildings, I was also able to see where the lens’s limits lay. At 12mm, the distortion becomes noticeable—enough that I chose to frame my shots elsewhere most of the time. Beyond 14mm, however, everything becomes straight and sharp again, and that’s where I found myself most often—between 16 and 20mm. The aperture, meanwhile, stays constant regardless of the focal length chosen, which makes life easier whenever the light changes as I walk. And the zoom lock—a small detail I hadn’t thought about before trying it out—prevented the ring from extending on its own whenever the lens was hanging from the end of the strap.
It was also in Val-Jalbert that I came across the village’s abandoned school. In front of the facade, a tree prevented me from stepping back far enough with my 28-75mm lens to frame the entire building. The 12-20mm lens solved the problem right away—a good reminder that wide-angle lenses have their place far beyond landscape photography, especially when the space around you becomes the real constraint.
The site isn't just made up of historic buildings. The 72-meter-high Ouiatchouan Falls flows right on the edge of the village, and it's the kind of setting that lends itself naturally to wide-angle photography: capturing the full grandeur of the falls without having to step back an infinite distance.
Day 2: In the Rain in Dolbeau-Mistassini
The next day, a planned astrophotography outing in Dolbeau-Mistassini was rained out. Rather than turn back, I made my way to the base of the falls to capture an image—a route that required crossing an overpass and then navigating my way through the wet rocks. The lens’s weather sealing held up just fine, and it was precisely its light weight that made navigating this rugged terrain possible without compromise—a heavier setup would have clearly slowed me down there. In fact, it was in the rain, just a few steps from the raging water, that I captured one of the most impressive landscapes of those two days.
What I've taken away from this
After two days in the field—amidst rain, low light, and challenging access—the Tamron 12-20mm F2.8 stands out above all for its unobtrusiveness: it’s lightweight, easy to carry, and makes no compromises on aperture when zooming. You’ll want to keep distortion below 14mm in mind, but beyond that, it’s a reliable wide-angle lens that delivers without any hassle!
