A fun, "full spectrum" system for those who want to travel lighter and who don't mind using good APS-C ("cropped frame") cameras.

 

Boston Mannequin. 

Photographed with a Sony a6300 and a 50mm lens.

Whether you photograph with Sony's APS-C (6000 series) cameras, Fuji's, or the recently discontinued Leica CL digital cameras I consider all of them to be contenders for really good travel "systems." The common thread through these particular makers' cameras are: smaller size, dense and very good imaging sensors and the ability to use Sigma's line of Contemporary lenses designed and made for the smaller formats. 

Each camera system provides at least a 24 megapixel sensor and those sensors are densely packed with pixels which can give images of very high resolution and sharpness when combined with really good lenses. All three brands make decent lenses for their particular cameras buy none of them, in my opinion, match the overall performance of the three Sigma prime lenses I own for the Leica CL cameras and none of them have as well rounded and compact a standard zoom lens as that provided by Sigma in the form of its 18-50mm f2.8. And recently Sigma released their own 23mm lens for those systems. 

All of the primes share one attribute: Their fastest aperture is f1.4. So you will be able to put together a system of primes ranging from 16mm to 56mm and all of them will be of very high speed. With the zoom lens there is a similar benefit, at least over the dedicated lenses that were sold by Leica for the APS-C cameras. Their system standard zoom is the 18-55mm f3.5-5.6. I don't own one and haven't shot one but the maximum aperture of f5.6 at the long end doesn't really make me passionate about adding one. Especially at the premium price...

I currently own three of the primes and with my recent order of the 23mm I'll have all four of their current, fast primes. The 16mm f1.4, 30mm f1.4 and the 56mm f1.4 have been paired up with my Leica CL cameras for about a year now and they bring a lot to the image making table when you consider the difference in size and weight when compared to my full frame cameras and lenses. 

A lot of people like the idea of f1.4 lenses and the Sigmas are decent at that wide aperture but where they really start to shine is from f2.0 on up to f8.0 or even f11. Once you start to stop any one of the primes down you get better and better performance. Actually stellar performance for the price.

I'm writing about them today because I just learned about a photographic retrospective that interests me. Linda McCartney ("The Beatles" Paul McCartney's late wife) was a very active and competent photographer who, in most of her career, had enviable access everywhere she went. She didn't become successful as a photographer as a result of being married to Paul McCartney but had already achieved high esteem for her work previous to their relationship. In fact she was the first woman to have a cover on Rolling Stone Magazine. Here's the wiki about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_McCartney

The show is at the The Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. At the University of Arizona. It opened in February and I guess I didn't do a very good job of keeping up. But, thankfully, the show is up until mid to late August 2023. The Center for Creative Photography houses collections from 2200 photographers including people such as Ansel Adams and David Hume Kennerly, and W. Eugene Smith.

The McCartney retrospective is displaying over 124 prints, many very large, and is a treasure trove of music industry images from the 1960s through to the 1990s. 

I decided I need to make a quick trip to Tucson to see the work directly. I also want to see if I can get access to several of the collections by other artists that the CCP houses. I'm putting together a fairly quick itinerary and will probably go toward the end of next week. I'll head over on Wednesday and return Friday evening. I also want to photograph in and around Tucson. Many years ago, in 1985, my advertising agency did a photo shoot at dusk in the Saguaro National Park, just outside of Tucson. I have fond memories of that gonzo event in the park.

It was a wild shoot on which we hung Christmas tree lights over a number of big cacti, lit them up with a large generator and photographed the glowing cacti from dusk into the darkness of night. Or course we had a permit from the National Parks, traffic police for the one lane of the nearby highway we needed to commandeer (much, much less traffic back then), millions of dollars of liability insurance (mostly for the cacti), cherry pickers to allow us access to the tall Saguaros and a team of dedicated stylists to make piles of wrapped gifts and gift-wrapped books under each visible cactus. My assistant and I were shooting as fast as we could as the light fell, knowing there would only be  a few minutes when the light from the cacti matched up well with the sunset and afterglow. I used a Hasselblad with a 50mm lens while my assistant fired away, endlessly bracketing a Nikon F3 and a 28mm lens. Of course these were the film days so if you were going to spend $20K or $30K of a client's money it was just good form to come back with at least one usable frame! And we shot that assignment on unforgiving transparency (slide) film.

The shoot was done for BookStop Bookstores which my agency had helped to grow from two Austin locations to a large chain that spanned 120 stores across the southern U.S.A, from Florida to California. Even to a store in Beverly Hills. They were bought out by Barnes and Noble in 1986 or 1987. I remember doing that shoot, which ran a double truck (two page) spreads in regional editions of Time Magazine, Newsweek Magazine and a few other popular consumer publications, on a financial shoe string. 

In fact, when my assistant and I finished wrapping the shoot, paying the local teams, getting all the gear packed and ready it was 4 a.m. in the morning. With our budget spent all the way to the tipping point and three magazine deadlines looming in a few short days we headed back to the airport for our 7 a.m. flight to Austin and got a quick nap in our rental car before turning it in. We were young then. You could do a few days like that and survive. 

And like most overworked advertising people of that time we just considered actual sleep to be a perk and not an absolute requirement. 

It's fun to think back and realize that we've been doing zany projects like this for real money since the late 1970's. And when you've got money in the mix you can 't just "wing it" or "spray and pray" you actually had to know what you were doing. And have back up plans. A quick way of saying that when we talk about gear here on VSL it comes from hands-on, high stress, actual experience. Not just conjecture and academic hearsay....

I'm looking forward to seeing the Linda  McCartney Retrospective. Her images come from a time when my generation was just coming of age. It should be an interesting step into something like a time machine.

So, I wanted to take along a small and light system with me for my visit to the gallery show and also to have for grabbing fun shots around a Tucson that's grown up a lot since I was last there. The idea of hauling around the big stuff for three days as well as on and off planes didn't seem very appetizing so I decided to piece together a mini system of two Leica CLs, a 16mm, 30mm and the 56mm Sigmas. All of which I own as L mount lenses. The CLs are magnificent little cameras and together with the fast Sigmas represent a formidable system. If the 23mm comes in before I leave I'll likely sub it for the 30mm. Just for grins. 

I've gotten plenty of great images from cropped frame cameras over the years which bolsters my decision to go small and light for what is basically a long distance gallery hop and mini-personal vacation. 

We'll see how it all pans out.