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My journey in the rarefied world of Astro began at a workshop run by super star photographer, Roger Groom. He expertly set me up with basics and now it’s up to me to get out there and put theory into practice.
For Astro photography, a wide angle lens with a large aperture of at least F2.8 works best. So I was pretty excited to try out the Sigma 16mm F1.4 DC DN lens courtesy of Saul Frank at Camera Electronic, Perth.
The 16mm Sigma lens is equivalent to a usefully wide 24mm coupled with my Fuji XT4. Along with a super wide aperture of F1.4 it will be interesting to see how it performs in a variety of situations.
Before getting into how the lens performed, I must talk about price. Fast lenses are often expensive pieces of kit. At around $600 to $700 depending on specials, this one seems ridiculously cheap.
My testing ground was a camping trip to the magnificent Ningaloo Reef coastline in Western Australia. Over a couple nights I set up my camera on a solid tripod, with settings around 10 seconds shutter speed and about 1600 ISO. A cable release reduced chances of camera movement. Fortunately the skies were dark and clear and the core of the Milky Way bright and beautiful.
So, how did it go?
Firstly, the lens feels solid and well constructed, belying its low price point. With my Fuji XT4, this lens feels balanced and easy to use.
When taking into account my obvious beginner status in Astro, the lens performance was satisfactory rather than top notch as there was some coma near the edges of the images. There was also a bit of blue chromatic aberration. None of these issues were deal breakers to my less trained eye.
But to be fair, this lens stacked up pretty well when you factor in the low price point.
For me, it’s the other areas of photography where this lens really comes up trumps.
I put the low light characteristics of the lens to the test and I thought it performed really well. My regular lens of choice is a Fuji 18mm to 135mm zoom with a widest aperture of F3.5. In low light it performs quite well especially with a high ISO. When I did a comparison with Sigma F1.4, the difference between the two was very noticeable.
Handheld, I shot these night street scenes from my apartment, using both lenses. It’s easy to see the difference between the F1.4 and the F3.5 with identical settings.
When shooting at F1.4, it allowed me to use a faster shutter speed at a lower ISO resulting in less noise or grainy images.
Normally I’m skeptical about the sharpness of low priced lenses, but in this case the Sigma performance is excellent. Even when heavily cropped, the images are sharp and crisp.
I also found the auto focus smooth and responsive.
Even as it is a wide angle lens, the F1.4 maximum aperture produces very nice shallow depth of field. By adjusting the shutter, the aperture changes to vary the depth of field.
In summarising, I enjoy taking photos in low light situations, and for me the F1.4 max aperture is the best feature of this lens. With the Sigma, I can shoot with a faster shutter and lower ISO compared with the F3.5. I can see myself having lots of fun shooting night cobblestone street scenes in Europe with this lens.
The Astro experiment produced pretty reasonable results even with my lack of experience in Milky Way photography. There are better lenses out there for chasing stars, but they are at least five times more pricier.
In reality, I’m not going to do a lot of Milky Way photography so this lenses’s other qualities are more important to me. So much so, I ended up buying the Sigma 16mm F1.4 lens as a useful addition to my travel photography kit.
All images on this post are taken using the Sigma 16mm F1.4 lens.
All images and text by Michael Pelusey.
