Taking a first journey with the Sigma 65mm f2 DG DN, I-series, Contemporary lens. Love at first focus.

I've been waiting impatiently for this lens to arrive in the market. I've always liked shooting with the 50mm focal length but on occasions when I was able to photograph with a 58mm or even a 60 macro I almost always felt like I was getting closer to the sweet spot for my photography. I own a fast 85mm but it feels like a compromise to me. My portrait work feels better at longer focal lengths like 100 to 135mms. But my casual, walking around looking for found objects and casual people photography always felt like it needed to be shorter than the 85. I've been looking for the "Goldilocks" focal length that I was sure lived somewhere between 50mm and 85mm for a long time.

I mentioned 60mm lenses but the ones I found were always macro lenses like the Leica 60 Elmarit-Makro or the Nikon 60mm f2.8 Micro lens. Both of them had very long focusing helicoids and hunted like mad badgers. Both were also optimized for close-up work and were less convincing at longer focus distances. What I've been looking for is a lens that handles like a 50mm in terms of focusing speed, size, weight and speed but has more reach and the ability to isolate objects to a greater degree than a 50mm.

Last Fall Sigma announced three new additions to their line of L-mount lenses which cover full frame sensors. The lenses were: A 24mm f3.5, a 35mm f2.0 and a 65mm f2.0. The specs on the 65mm looked most promising. It's a thoroughly modern optical design that uses three different specialty glass elements. The overall design uses 12 elements in 9 groups, which represents a fairly complex and sophisticated design for a long, normal lens. And the other specs indicate that this lens is constructed completely out of metal; all the way down to the lens hood. 

Knowing how uncertain the product channels are these days I decided that I'd pre-order a copy. I did so at both B&H Photo and at my local dealer, Precision Camera. My sales associate at Precision texted me about four hours ahead of B&H's notice. I cancelled the B&H order and headed up to PC the next morning to grab the lens. That was yesterday. 

I had so many good intentions to get out of the neighborhood with a camera and this lens this morning and really put it through its paces but too many things came up. I'm the family I.T. director and there were network issues today. Still not totally resolved but there are workarounds in place that ensure basic productivity for all three of us here. There was a car issue that needed to be taken care of. Who knew that Toyota would launch a third recall for defective airbags in one model. It's the kid's car but he was engulfed in a work project and didn't have the bandwidth to mess with getting a car to service. That also fell to me. 

By four o'clock I was hellbent on getting out to get more fresh air (got tons this morning at swim practice) and to see if the lens was as good as I thought it might be. It was. 

The lens is solidly made and features a grippy, metal knurled focusing ring and the same for the aperture setting ring. The aperture can be set on a tactilely luxurious, external ring or you can set the ring to the "A" setting and use a camera dial to control the aperture.  The lens hood has the same design aesthetic as the 45mm f2.8 lens's hood. It's solid metal with a knurled finish that matches well with the focusing ring and the aperture ring. While the lens comes with a standard "pinch to remove" lens cap it also comes with a solid metal lens cap that is held on by magnets embedded under a felt ring. It's so lux. 

While the 65mm f2.0. isn't tiny and certainly isn't a pancake lens, neither is it like the newest generations of gargantuan 50mm lenses with enormous front elements and 82mm filter rings. The lens is about 1/2 the volume and weight of the 50mm S-Pro lens for the Lumix L-mount cameras. It feels just the way a long normal lens should feel, if you grew up in the days of film lenses and use those as a referent. 

While f2.0 isn't a super fast f-stop it's more than enough for current, full frame cameras  which seem to handle ISOs like 3200 and 6400 effortlessly. I've been veering away from my tired, old dogma of using the cameras at their base ISOs for highest quality and have started setting my ISO to Auto and letting my cameras head north; toward photon fulfillment. The S1 is happiest at 6400 and below. The S1R likes to settle in at 3200 and below, while the Sigma fp is perfectly happy all the way up to ISO 12,800.  It all seems like magic to me. But I'm happy to take advantage of it. Especially if I'm working in black and white. 

My first tests with the new lens were to see just how well it performed at f2.0 and I'm happy to report that it's nicely sharp wide open. Stopping down to f5.6 improves the performance incrementally but it's already so good wide open that the improvements are modest. This means I can use the widest apertures with impunity instead of dancing around with sloppy edges, and trying to valiantly get to f4.0 or slower. 

I used the lens to shoot about 200 images this afternoon. It was cold, bright and crisp outside in the late afternoon and I was happy to be mobile and moving. I should probably give the long suffering keyboard a rest and just let you browse the final images. 

I used the Sigma 65mm f2.0 DN DG lens on a Lumix/Panasonic S1R and it seemed like a great match when considering the overall look and integrity of the package. It also represented a perfectly balanced mix. The camera felt absolutely neutral and comfortable in my hands. My only issue so far was that the lens and camera had trouble focusing through a couple of dirty, glass windows but I switched to manual and had the focus nailed quickly. The manual ring, while fly by wire is very well damped and has a nice, predictable feel to it. In fact, it didn't just make manual focusing proficient or easy, it made manual focusing fun. 

I shot all the images presented below as fine Jpegs. Knowing I'd only be presenting this work on the web I chose to shoot in the medium size setting of just under 24 megapixels.

I found the lens a delight from two points of view. First, I liked the focal length and framing. Secondly, I loved the whole idea of a reasonably fast, perfectly sized and masterfully built lens on the front of my camera. I can't imagine even a Leica lens exceeding the build quality on display here. 

I am smitten which will probably signal the death knell for this whole blog enterprise since I can imagine that I'll never want to use anything else ever again and you will become bored in a five or six months after I write hundreds and hundreds of paeans to the 65mm lens's magnificence. A wonderful addition to any L-mount kit. And, for those lucky Sony A7x owners--- it's also available in e mount. 

A bargain at $699. (USD)

Click to go big.

The Sad And Frustrating Feelings Engendered When a Relatively New Camera Just Stops Working. Looking Forward to See How Panasonic Will Resolve the Failure.

Ouch. Just...ouch! It's been a long time since I've had a digital camera body fail. Maybe all the way back to my Nikon D2x days. It's never a comfortable thing and the resolution; even when the company that makes the product steps up, is time consuming, frustrating  and ultimately erodes the idea of the camera's reliability. Dead cameras suck.

The camera in question is a Panasonic Lumix S1R. I bought it on November 28, 2019 and I've used it sparingly. I bought it as a back-up body for another S1R that I purchased about a month earlier. The camera has never been used in the rain, travels in a Think Tank backpack, has never been on a plane, or even a badly sprung pick-up truck. Of all my Panasonic cameras it's the one with the least mileage on it and since the advertising for the camera touts its robustness and impeccable build quality its untimely surrender of usability just galls me.

So, what happened? I'd set up a portrait session here in my studio with a good friend and had the camera set for a revisitation of my older style of portraiture. I was using it in the 1:1 crop mode and shooting raw files to a tested and almost new CFexpress card. The camera had a fresh battery in it and gave no hints of its impending demise. I was working with the camera on a tripod and lighting the session with LED lights. Room temperature around 68 degrees (f) and just enough humidity in the room to extinguish any static electricity.

I'd shot about 225 frames, reviewed some of them normally, and then stepped away from the camera for a few minutes to adjust lights and chat with my friend. The camera went into sleep mode and when I pushed the shutter button to wake it back up again it stayed dormant. I turned the camera off and turned it back on again. I got the following message: "turn camera off and turn back on again." We tried that a number of times but it was a loop that brought me back to the same message over and over again.

I didn't want to waste my friend's time or truncate the session so I reached into the equipment toolkit and pulled an identical body out of the drawer, put the 85mm lens on that camera and proceeded to finish the shoot (because that's exactly what professionals are supposed to do...).

After the session was over and my friend was off to some other engagement I went through the standard trouble-shooting protocol: I changed batteries. I tried different lenses. I swapped out memory cards. I turned the camera on while holding down various buttons. Nothing would allow me to leave the cycle of: turn on, get message, turn off.

My favorite camera store doesn't close until 7pm on weekdays so I called my trusty sales person and explained the problem. He took down the details and sent a message to the Panasonic technical representative. I'm now waiting for a call back from someone to find out what we do next. My optimistic side wants the resolution to happen like this: I get a secret formula of button presses and reset options from the tech support people. Once we bring the camera back to life we reload the firmware and everything turns out to be just right. 

My second choice is that the store, the rep and the company decide to immediately make everything right by shipping me a new camera body overnight while the local store accepts the old one and takes responsibility for getting it back to Panasonic in trade for my new one.

My pessimistic self tells me an uncomfortable saga wherein fingers are pointed everywhere, the camera is sent in for warranty repair but it takes months to come back and then, two weeks later, the same problem resurfaces. I hope I'm absolutely wrong about this imagined option.

In one regard I've been proven correct about the need for professionals to have back-ups for their important gear. Lots of back-ups. That I was able to reach into a nearby drawer and pull out an identical camera model and finish the shoot the way I intended was a good thing and made me feel like a competent business person. I would never really tolerate having to tell a good client that I couldn't continue the job at hand because my "only" camera failed.

But this does break the feeling of trust in the equipment that I've been enjoying. Now I'll be on guard and nervous every time I take one of the S1R cameras out of my camera bag and start to use it. And that's a sad thing because it diminishes the joy of using gear you thought you could rely upon to work, as long as you kept it fed with batteries and safe from abuse.

I'm waiting (im)patiently for a response from someone today. There's still the second S1R and two S1s here in the office. I am not without workable tools. I'm just frustrated and a bit pissed off.

In other notes: We actually got a dusting of snow last night here in Austin. There was snow on the roof of the house and even across the windshield of my car. Studio Dog was delighted because she seems to love the cold (but I made her wear her sweater for her walk just so I'd be warm....) and now she's delighted because the sun is out and there are still spots of snow in the backyard that she can romp through and then track melted snow through the house. 

It was 30 degrees (f) when I got to the swimming pool this morning. The air was cold, the water was warm and the sun was brilliant. The sky was clean with those nicely saturated blue hues I always like in photographs. 

We did a good, long set and I worked on my freestyle technique with an extra dollop of diligence. I didn't think of my broken camera even once during the workout. I saved that nagging tug of concern for the drive back home. 

Camera Death. So sad. I'll let you guys know how it all turns out. This is Panasonic's opportunity to show off their customer service and make a blogger who just celebrated his 26,000,000th page view this week happy....

Work I did decades ago still drives my search for the right digital camera and lens. Odd how that happens. I'm finally narrowing it down.

L.L.

This was photographed in my favorite, old studio at 500 San Marco St., over in east Austin. I was renting about 3000 square feet of space which came complete with 20 foot ceilings. I got the space when the company that owned the building was converting it from warehouse space to office and studio space. I think my rent was somewhere around $750 a month and included righteously good air conditioning and electric power + water service. Now $750 would barely cover utilities on a space that size....

I still have a recurring dream that I inadvertently left a bunch of gear and paperwork in the space and also that I forgot to tell them I was moving out. I wake up worried that I've lost precious negatives and that I owe tens of thousands of dollars in back rent, starting from 22 years ago... But the reality is that I renovated a new space at a property we bought and settled out with the previous studio landlord with all the paperwork done nicely and properly.

But it was such a fun and expansive space in which to shoot. I could set up a portrait subject ten or 

twenty feet from the front of my camera and still have a space of 25 feet behind the camera for the background. With those kinds of distances one could use longer lenses and the focus fall off to the background was nothing short of exhilarating. I make due in a much smaller space now and for the most part it works out because: A. We own the space. And, B. The vast majority of projects I do these days are on location. Would I still like a studio with 60 feet of linear space to work in? You bet. Would I like to pay thousands of dollars per month to occasionally shoot a portrait with absolutely no constraints? Hmmm. Maybe not so much....

The image above was shot in the studio just for the hell of it. We went through so much medium format film in a month that burning through ten or twelve rolls of color transparency film photographing a beautiful subject was a tiny drop in the bucket, financially. 

This one was done during a test session. We were breaking in two new lenses for our Hasselblad system; one was the new just then 180mm f4.0 Zeiss lens and the other was the 250mm f4.0 Zeiss lens  (I was replacing the 250mm f5.6 version with the faster version made for the 201F and other F cameras). The image is a look that I liked (and still like) very much. A long, fast lens on a big chunk of film. 

In fact, it's been the gold standard I still use to judge how successfully a current camera and lens system comes to matching or even getting close to what we could do with MF film, without breaking a sweat. So, my system from 24 years ago drives me to look at particular cameras and lenses, in a particular way, even now. 

When I used the 180mm f4.0 lens on a 6x6cm square Hasselblad format the corresponding 35mm equivalent angle of view was about 100mm. It always seemed just right to me. The 250mm was equal to about a 135mm on 35mm which was wonderful in my longer studio but would be unmanageable in the current space. 

I'm currently trying really hard to fit the Panasonic Lumix S1R, coupled with the Sigma 85mm f1.4 Art lens, into the mix and trying to set up the smaller system to best emulate what I used to get from the bigger film system. It's tougher work than I thought it would be but with every model encounter I get closer and closer. The first big step for me was to limit the S1R to shooting in the square, 1:1 format. That makes the 85mm effectively about 10mm longer by comparison. The next thing is trying to find the right imaging parameters with which I can get deep, dark shadows but wide open, airy highlights. Not exactly trying to leverage the ultimate in dynamic range at both ends of the curve but mostly just at the lighter (shoulder) edge of the tonal range. It's all a compromise but then again, so was film and film processing. 

I'm in the studio today trying to reverse engineer my own lighting from the 1990s. I'm afraid I really will need to re-buy one more five by six foot soft box. Somethings just can't be substituted...

I hope you are making good use of your vacation. I'm re-branding and re-strategizing for 2020 and I'm working hard and locking down what I want to make. It takes new work.