Pick up an old lens from the 1970s, 80s, sometimes even early 90s, and the first thing you notice is not the optics but the feel. The focus ring that once had a pleasant rubber grip now feels unpleasantly tacky. Your fingers pick up a dark smear, almost like soft tar. It looks like dirt, but washing your hands doesn’t remove the mystery. The lens itself may be optically perfect, yet the grip behaves like something slowly melting.

Something slightly counterintuitive happens when you look at the Tamron 35–100mm f/2.8 through the lens of crop-sensor photography. On paper it’s a full-frame zoom sitting awkwardly between two traditional categories. In practice, though, its design echoes a lens many APS-C shooters have wanted for years but rarely get: a lightweight 50–150mm f/2.8 equivalent. Take the focal range first. On a full-frame camera the Tamron spans 35mm to 100mm. That covers the classic documentary and portrait focal lengths—35mm environmental shots, 50mm standard perspective, 85mm portraits, and 100mm tighter headshots.

Canon’s RF system already has some remarkable lenses, but one category still feels oddly unfinished: the lightweight, budget-friendly telephoto zoom for full-frame photographers who want speed without carrying a massive professional lens. Right now the lineup jumps from compact consumer zooms straight to the big 70–200mm f/2.8 class. Those lenses are fantastic, but they are expensive, heavy, and simply more equipment than many photographers want to carry every day. What is missing is a practical middle ground.

Running two cameras has become my way of keeping photography practical. One body carries a wider lens, the other stays ready for reach, and suddenly the whole workflow becomes smoother. No frantic lens swapping, no heavy bag filled with glass, just two cameras that together cover the real situations photographers actually encounter. For me that pairing is the Canon R8 and the Canon R100. One full-frame body for versatility and low-light capability, one lightweight crop body for reach and mobility.

Some lenses age poorly. Others become oddly relevant years later. The Sigma 50–150mm f/2.8 for Canon APS-C cameras belongs firmly in the second category. It was designed during the DSLR era, yet its concept fits almost perfectly with today’s mirrorless APS-C systems. The key version worth talking about is the non-stabilized Sigma 50–150mm f/2.8 EX DC HSM. This lens weighed roughly 770 grams, which immediately tells you what Sigma was trying to achieve: a professional constant-aperture telephoto built specifically for crop sensors, but without the bulk of a traditional 70–200mm f/2.

Something interesting is happening in the lens world right now. Tilt-shift optics—once rare, expensive tools reserved mostly for architectural professionals—are suddenly appearing in far more accessible forms for mirrorless cameras. Two new 17 mm lenses illustrate the shift perfectly: the Laowa 17 mm f/4 Zero-D Tilt-Shift and the TTArtisan 17 mm f/4 Tilt-Shift ASPH. Both aim squarely at photographers who want perspective control, creative focus manipulation, and ultra-wide coverage without spending the kind of money traditionally required for this category.

When the Pentax 67 200mm f/4 is mounted on the Canon R8 using a standard Pentax-67-to-RF adapter, the lens behaves exactly as it was designed: a true 200mm f/4 telephoto. The adapter does not change the focal length or the aperture. It simply positions the lens at the correct distance from the sensor so the optics can focus properly, including infinity. Because the Canon R8 uses a full-frame sensor, the entire photographic experience with this lens becomes very natural.

The Pentax 67 mount is technically obsolete, but calling it irrelevant would be a mistake. The system was created in 1969 for the large Pentax 6×7 film camera, later renamed Pentax 67, and it remained in production until the early 2000s. Pentax eventually ended development when digital photography overtook medium-format film systems, and no modern digital camera bodies use the Pentax 67 mount natively. In that strict sense the mount belongs to a discontinued ecosystem.