New Lens

I love photography! I enter lots of different competitions and sometime I even manage to get into the top few who get prizes. This time I managed to get myself a £150 gift voucher. I needed to get a longer reach macro lens and this seemed like a good chance to fill the gap. I thought I would try a used lens, save some money.

So I found a used lens on the WEX photographic site, Sigma 105mm Macro for £170, it was listed as condition 9- as it had a dent on the metal hood. Other than that it said that the image quality was fine. I thought that seeing as only £20 was my own money I would give it go.

I was very happy when the lens arrived, it was exactly as they described it and the image quality was perfect, super sharp and that 1:1 ratio gave me some awesome images already. Really looking forward to August and some macro dragonfly action down by the water.

From my limited experience with second hand lenses I can say that I had excellent value for money from this buy.

All Wrapped Up

Take Off

Rose Spider

The lens is quite sharp at f/2.8 though when shooting macro the depth of field at this aperture is so shallow you would have be lucky rather than good to get what you were aiming at in focus. At f/4.0 it becomes super sharp and stay that way all the way to f/18 after which diffraction kind of fuzzes things a little but still better than most zoom macro 1:2 lenses. The AF system is a bit clunky and slow and tends to hunt a little in low light. Though with macro you are way better off using the MF setting. In good light the lens focuses accurately with no sign of front or rear focusing issues.

As you can see the bokeh is really, really nice and this will take over as my go to portrait lens.

#Photography #Macro #Review