The heat wave kept me from going out, and rain prevented me from going out when I had the chance, so I was not able to try the SIGMA 17mm F4 DG DN ultra-wide-angle single focal length lens until mid-July, a few weeks after I purchased it and just as the rainy season was about to end.
The combination of the LUMIX S5 and the i-series SIGMA 17mm, even though it was lightweight equipment, it was a bit of a nuisance to carry in my bag while I was out running errands, so I forced myself to make 30 minutes to take some test shots, determined not to waste this effort.
First, without thinking, I quickly moved in close to a leaf that had fallen on the railing of a bench and took a shot.
I thought that stopping down to f/16 would give me a pan-focus look, but as you can imagine, I was too close to the leaves in the foreground to get the focus just right.
If pan-focusing was too difficult, I decided to blur the distant background, so I took this shot at the bicycle parking lot with a wide aperture of F/4.
If you get this close, even at F/4, you can get a decent amount of blur and the bokeh is beautiful.
Of course, if you keep a certain distance from the subject and then stop down the aperture, the picture will be more than tight enough across the entire image. The picture in the ↓ is at F8.
I had an image (preconceived notion) that SIGMA lenses are sharp and edgy, but after using three of the i-series lenses (this 17mm, 50mm and 90mm) with the S5, I think they are indeed sharp, but not too sharp and balanced. I like it again. Once again, I like it.
Now, let’s see,
Since this is a super wide-angle lens, I’m likely to take more photos that emphasize perspective by placing the subject in the foreground as much as possible. So it is very important to be able to “get close” to the subject. But this lens allows you to get very close.
For example, if you are walking along the street and see a beautiful leaf on the trunk of a roadside tree, you can get very close and take a picture without thinking (the minimum shooting distance is 12cm).
Focus is indeed very severe when you get this close, and I had to take quite a lot of shots and make my selections . But it is fun to use a lens that allows you to get close.
By the way, the overfocal distance of this lens is, if you stop down to f/22, the allowable diameter of the circle of confusion is 0.03mm… 17^2/(0.03*22), so… about 43cm, If you can make it pan-focus by focusing 43cm away, you may have a chance to use it not only for “close-up perspective” (I have no idea how to use this kind of thing in the field, and I always calculate it later).
The small and light SIGMA 17mm is my “super wide-angle talisman” that I keep in the corner of my bag when shooting mainly with a standard single focus or standard zoom. It is as solid as I expected it to be, and I am sure that it will be a reliable good-luck charm for me.
All of these photos were taken in RAW and developed in PhotoLab 7 to JPG files. I did not correct for any distortion, but I did fine-tune the exposure to my liking as part of my “usual routine,” and I also applied Adobe’s “S5 Landscape” DCP for color and contrast and applied a weak “haze remover” to the images.
