Why a 28-200mm Might Beat Your “Perfect” Lens in Bad Weather

Gear advice gets loud when landscapes get quiet, and the loudest claim is that a superzoom can’t handle “serious” work. That idea pushes you into swapping lenses, second-guessing focal lengths, and leaving shots behind when the weather turns awkward.

Coming to you from Jason Friend Photography, this fog-soaked video puts the Tamron 28-200mm f/2.8-5.6 Di III RXD on a Sony a7C and takes it into the kind of morning that exposes weak habits fast. Friend opens with the usual internet warnings: small sensors, fixed lenses, superzooms, and the constant pressure to “use the right thing.” Instead of arguing on theory, he walks into a coastal scene where fog erases the lighthouse and forces decisions in real time. You watch him start with a polarizer to manage glare, then scrap the plan when the subject practically disappears. He shifts into a longer exposure mindset, drops the polarizer, and reaches for a 10-stop ND filter while the camera sits on a tripod in wind and mist.

The first real tradeoff lands where it should: at the long end of the zoom. Friend points out that when you push toward 200mm, the lens ends up around f/5.6, and that can feel limiting if you’re trying to shoot handheld in low light. He doesn’t pretend that limitation vanishes, but he frames it the way you actually experience it outdoors: if you’re already on a tripod and already chasing long exposures, the slower aperture changes less than people think. He also calls out a practical fix when you are handheld, leaning on ISO as a lever instead of treating it like a forbidden setting. More interesting is what the fog does to focusing, especially with older bodies in low contrast, and how quickly that turns into a composition problem instead of a technical one. The coastline segment doesn’t magically resolve into a perfect hero image, and that’s the point.

When the beach scene won’t cooperate, Friend heads inland to a local woodland and the tone changes. The fog is still there, but now the subject choices multiply and the superzoom starts behaving like a scouting tool instead of a compromise. He walks, frames, adjusts, and keeps moving, grabbing handheld shots on the way in rather than treating the “real” photos as something that only happens once the tripod is planted. You see him work toward a square-crop idea and talk through what he wants you to ignore at the edges, which is a useful reminder that framing starts before you ever open an editor. He experiments across focal lengths and lands near the 40mm range after seeing how 28mm pulls in too much sky and stepping back invites clutter. He also rethinks aperture in the moment, backing off from f/14 toward f/10 when it better matches what the scene needs.

Later, Friend goes straight at the complaint everyone expects: image quality. He’s blunt that a superzoom won’t beat a high-end standard zoom in every measurable way, and he doesn’t hide the word “compromise.” What he does instead is describe where those compromises show up and where they don’t, especially once correction and finishing enter the workflow and you’re judging the final photo instead of a magnified corner sample. He’s also clear that some days demand speed more than perfection, like changing compositions quickly in fog without swapping lenses and inviting moisture onto the sensor. He keeps circling back to conditions and subject choice, using the transformed woodland with fast-moving water and layered mist as his proof of concept rather than a lab test. He even nods to the reality that premium options exist, like a Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II, then returns to what you gain when you carry one lens and stay in the moment. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Friend.