Sigma 24-135 f/2.8-4.5 lens - decent for portraits

DanHart · #1 03-15-2004, 03:28 AM

I'm not real thrilled with the quality from my Canon 28-135 IS lens and was wondering how the Sigma 24-135 f/2.8-4.5 zoom lens might be. Edge quality is not particularly important to me with portraits of individuals... anyone have much experience with this Sigma?

The Canon 24-70 L lens is great, but not long enough for my liking. I do use the 70-200 f/2.8L lens and it is wonderful, but a beast and doesn't have the wide range I'd like. I'd like to find one good lens I can use for general portraiture of individuals in the 28-105 or 28-135 range. Thanks.

P.S. Why the heck doesn't Canon make a kick butt 28-105mm f/2.8 L lens???? Or a 28-135 f/3.5 L lens. I'll bet they'd sell a ton of them to portrait photographers.

Jonathan_Wienke · #2 03-15-2004, 04:04 AM

Have you considered the 35-350 f/3.5-5.6L? It has a bit of CA and softness in the corners at the wide end (at least my copy) but overall image quality is quite good; better than any of the consumer-grade zooms. It's sharper than necessary for a lot of portrait work, and extremely flexible.

DanHart · #3 03-16-2004, 04:40 AM

Jonathan.... I hadn't considered it at all... but the range is remarkable. The compression and shallowness of focus at 300 to 350 must be pretty dramatic... just what I love for portraits... creamy soft, nearly unrecognizible backgrounds. That's how I like to use my 70-200 f/2.8 L lens. Given that the 35-350 is an L lens, I would assume that the image quality would be at least very good if not excellent. I'll have to have a look at it. Thanks for the suggestion!

Jonathan_Wienke · #4 03-16-2004, 02:01 PM

It's not as excellent as some of the other L glass, but it's definitely a step up from the mid-grade lenses and way better than the consumer-grade zooms. Most of the stuff on my site was shot with it.

BenTaylor · #5 03-16-2004, 07:19 PM

The 35-350 is an interesting lens. I just sold mine only because I had to adjust my gear for health and financial reasons. A three pound lens is now my one "lugging chore" while the 35-350 was a secondary body lens before. I tossed a sample page together for the lens with complete EXIF info.

The lens is comfortable in an odd way. Whatever surprises it delivers are usually pleasant. It has a calm tonal range from frame edge to frame edge as well as more than adequate sharpness.

http://www.bentaylor.com/35-350L/index.htm

Jonathan_Wienke · #6 03-16-2004, 07:34 PM

Here's one of my 35-350 sample shots, shot at 35mm, f/5.6. It's a 5 MB file:

http://209.77.219.162:8000/images/187U2033.jpg

This was shot with a 1Ds, which is most unforgiving of corner performance. The lens will be sharper if you zoom in and/or stop down. And the 1.6X crop factor will get rid of all the corner fuzziness.