A few more shots from the Sigma
June 10th, 2009 | 
Author: Although the subject matter is quite boring, here are a couple more shots from my new lens.
And just for size comparison here is a shot of my 70-200mm lens next to the new 150-500. It is noticeably longer and quite a bit heavier. But it does show the relative size.
While I have barely taken any photos I have already noticed a few interesting things. As you may know the zoom and focus rings are reversed on the 150-500. The zoom is the first ring, closest to the front and the focus in located toward the back. Not sure if that’s good or bad, just different.
Unlike the 18-200mm lens I have you can really notice the OS kick in on this one. I notice quite a bit of shake as I handhold the lens at 500mm. But once you hold the shutter halfway down for a second everything smoothes out and the shake is all but gone. The picture of the fly above, while not perfect, was taken at 500mm and 1/100 sec with me handholding the camera. It’s not an award winner, but considering I was about 10+ feet away and aiming at something that small, I feel the fact you can even tell what’s there is pretty impressive. The whole picture isn’t a blurred mess so the OS is doing a fine job of holding things steady.
Even though it’s an f/5 – f/6.3 lens, I have still been able to get pretty high shutter speeds. I’ve only been able to take pictures after 6:30 pm so even though it’s still light out, the camera doesn’t exactly agree. However, it is still hitting 1/800 at some points and 1/320 without much trouble. And even at the lower speeds it’s still able to grab photos. I doubt this will work as an indoor shooter or in low light, but for outdoor summer shots (which is my main way of using it) I don’t foresee any issue in grabbing his speed shots.
I said it before, but this thing is big. There is absolutely nothing subtle about this monster. It is significantly bigger than the 70-200mm so I fully expect when I use this in a crowd I will get plenty of looks.
I’m looking forward to taking more pictures this weekend to get a better feel for how the lens works and the range it has. I really like the OS and you can hear it working. Some people may be turned off by that since you can hear some whirring and some clicks, but so far I don’t see it as a problem. So far I am very excited about this lens and feel it can really deliver some pretty impressive images.
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