‘Close your eyes and think of the weirdest plant or or animal with the craziest patterns & colours'.
Despite having owned SLRs back in the days of film, I got into digital photography relatively late, buying my first DSLR in 2018. I had been spurred on by winning a photo competition a year earlier, and being interested in natural world images, I invested in a SIGMA 105mm F2.8 DG OS HSM MACRO lens. Photographing extreme close-ups of flowers quickly became my focus, with their delicate and intricate structures and vivid and often contrasting colours really grabbing my attention. Not only do I love to marvel at this incredible, tiny, rarely-seen world, but I’m a believer that this kind of photography is very beneficial for our general wellbeing. With my camera in my hand, time seems to slow down. I forget about the unnecessary things in life, and all of my worries, and just appreciate that moment in time.
My macro lens of choice is the SIGMA 105mm F2.8 DG OS HSM MACRO. Its amazing close-focusing ability allows me to shoot flowers or insects at 1:1 magnification, which means they’re recorded at life size on my camera’s sensor. This reveals incredible detail that you just can’t see with the naked eye. When using the lens at its widest aperture of F2.8, I am able to achieve a very shallow depth-of-field to help give my subject definition against the background, and for me the bokeh is gorgeous. I often run home from a shoot (well, walk fast) to get my images on screen and marvel at the amazing detail the lens is able to resolve, even as tiny as the individual hairs on a flower or insect. Unlike most macro photographers I rarely use a tripod when I shoot, so I need my lens to be able to react quickly to fast-moving subjects, which the 105mm certainly does. I really can’t speak highly enough about the SIGMA 105mm for macro work, and I often use it for short-telephoto landscapes too, so it really is a versatile piece of kit. I hope that the world I capture through this lens wows others as much as it wows me.
Published 27th October 2020 - To read the full article and see Quirky Junkets images take a visit to Sigma Imaging.