I saw this cute little bugger of a Sigma 105mm prime lens in Cash Converters in Belfast city centre. After a few hours deliberation, my old Sigma 28-300 zoom got traded in and home I went. Tried the new lens out around the house etc with mixed results but then came home one afternoon and saw a huge spider lit up by the late afternoon sun. Why not?
I struggled with the lens. I wanted to keep a low ISO (around 200) to get the detail and there was a breeze blowing the web back and fro so I needed a pretty high shutter speed. This left me with a pretty big apperture and very short depth of field. I got a few shots like this one, where either the body wasn't sharp and the head was or it was the other way round.
However, after a bit of fiddling around a lot of wasted shots I did start to get something useful and interesting. This shot of a hover fly is a cropped version of the original, but it has some excellent detail on the head and in the eyes and the blurred backgorund seems to work pretty well. I also couldn't figure out why the manual focus ring wasn't working - it was just spinning without doing anything. I later discovered that the focus ring clicks forward and back to engage manual or automatic focus.
So - my second hand Sigma lens gives great detail (with pratice I think it would be even better) and the colours seem vibrant and well-defined as well, although I suspect that a lot of that is down to the Nikon D90 which just seems to give the most beautiful colours of any DSLR I've used.
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