Depth of Field

Does ISO 800 not produce a lot of noise for you?

Personally if I want a uniform DoF I will use F8 ISO100 and whatever shutterspeed light will allow. That said, if it was darkish when you took this, such high ISO is understandable.

F8 seems to be the sweet spot for same depth of field at all distances in good daylight

 

that explains it.. did you hand hold the camera? it would be interesting to see results with the same settings on a tripod

 

Tamron 70-300 is an excellent lens.. considering it is a budget lens at around £100 maybe even cheaper.. for Canon, Sigma, and Nikon equivalent you can pay £2-300 for a lens (70-300) that is not that much better than Tamron.

 

A good tripod is worth its weight in gold. The following close-up was taken late evening in poor light in the greenhouse..................


Using the tripod I was able to use F8 at ISO 400 with a 1/20 shutter speed timer fired. These settings with the stock 18-55 lens still allow for the blurred background hiding the fact that it is in the greenhouse but noise is still an issue. Unusually for my camera I had to adjust the white balance slightly towards the red spectrum to get the colour right.

 

I hardly ever use mine

Being serious now though it has great colour Woo. You have set the contrast nicely too.
I have a Nikon and it struggles with some reds - I suspect that would have been a real battle for me to get a good colour likeness using anything other than flash mode.

 

I presume you have gone with ISO800 again? If so that's a good capture, you've managed to minimise the noise rather well.. it's still there but not distracting from the subject (the rose).. There is some Chromatic abberation around the edges of the rose.. therefore I suspect you were zoomed in at 300mm? (maximum)? If that's the case, try zooming in at about three quarters the way and it should get rid of any CA. ps I always have problems with halo, chromatic abberation and lack of definition if I was zoomed in at 280-300mm. The following shots I took a few years ago describe this a little bit better

this is at 119mm



75.5mm



and this take at 300mm (note the lack of sharpness and definition and huge amounts of chrom. abb.

 

I use it mostly for doing studies when the weather is poor. A few examples..................






The one thing that I regret is not buying one with a tilt facility on the mount.