I was really excited to get this lens it's the smallest aperture prime I have ever owned. Olympus doesn't make a prime below 2.0 so I had to go with Sigma to get the little bit wider aperture, and I am very happy I did.
Heres a couple shots of the lens and one of our new hen and chicks plants to show you how narrow narrow the depth of field is at 1.4 from about 6 feet away.
One of the main reasons I wanted a very wide aperture prime is to be able to have a narrow depth of field when shooting portraits, especially when you do location shoots. It's always a pain when you get back to the computer and see those pesky power lines in the background. Narrow depth of field is a very effective way to force focus on the subject of your picture without having the viewer start looking around at all the other elements in the picture that are sharp as well. Another great thing about narrow depth of field is bokeh. Bokeh is a Japanese word and basically means the aesthetic quality of blur. You can use blur as a very creative element in your photography. Which is what me and my children set out to do in the basement this evening.
I have always been attracted to blurred lights in the background. Duh, look at the background to my blog right? So the background on the blog was created in Photoshop from a tutorial I learned over at Abduzeedo, but I am very excited to be able to create these types of images now with a fast prime lens. We put up a small fast setup with a quick background, some Christmas globes from the holidays, a single flash, a reflector, a lovely model and a nice wide open prime lens. All in all we had about 45 minutes with set up, shots, then tear down.
I'm pleased, how about you?
And for you photographers who read here's a pull back view of the whole shebang.
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