Shooting Flowers With Bill Koczocik’s Lens

At f/2.8 the lens doesn’t need a lot of light, however the focus at that aperture was much more critical than I expected. I have little experience with this grade of lens.

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I talk about cameras to anyone who will listen. How to shoot. What to shoot. Where to shoot. I do as much listening as talking. There’s a lot of good info to be gleaned.

Last week one one of the guys I talk cameras with in the studio, Bill Koczocik, brought in a lens for me to try. It’s a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8. That means it’s a fast midrange zoom.

The word “fast” when referring to lenses means less light is needed and the depth-of-field (distance range from the lens which is in focus) can be very shallow. Fast lenses are usually sharper and heavier too. Guilty on both counts.

I threw the lens on the camera this afternoon and walked toward the brook. Though this little river flows year-round this is its low point–especially after a week without rain. The smaller the brook or stream the more it reacts to instantaneous weather with extremely variable flow rates.

With little near the stream bed but exposed rocks I concentrated on the last of the perennials still in bloom (and then only barely).

Here’s what I found. As I expected this lens is in a strange, not wide enough/not long enough, zone for my camera.

Bill, whose Canon has a full size sensor, sees totally different images from this very same lens. On his camera the field-of-view is much wider.

At f/2.8 the lens doesn’t need a lot of light, however the focus at that aperture was much more critical than I expected. I have little experience with this grade of lens.

3 thoughts on “Shooting Flowers With Bill Koczocik’s Lens”

  1. Off topic a little. One of those cute fuzzy little guys stung me yesterday while picking peaches off my peach tree. As pretty as they are, they aren’t very happy when you grab one!!

  2. You and I have similar cameras, and I tried out a lens similar to this. Nice lens, but I wanted a wider focal range, and ended up getting the Tamron 17-35 mm f/2.8

  3. Actually a “fast” lens has a larger aperture, which allows more light in per unit of time, allowing for a faster exposure – great for your time exposures, bad for your budget. And with regards to your entry today on the amount of digital data we all have, well that just leads to a discussion of the impact of digital (sampled) versus analog, in photography, music and elsewhere. Photographers used to have to pay for film and developing, so they used less. It was common to “bracket” a shot by shooting exposures on either side of the calculated best exposure, but not to fire away endlessly. And in a quest to reproduce analog quality results (whether in music or photography) we now pay for massive amounts of digital storage. Purchasing better equipment is a natural by-product of artistic awareness. Even vinyl LPs are coming back, as the all-digital generation is astonished by what uncompressed can sound like on a good system. Almost like live…LOL

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