Thinking of something narrower: Panasonic 42.5 F/1.7, Olympus 45mm F/1.8 or Sigma 30mm F/2.8

Fredrik Glckner wrote:

brentbrent wrote:

I haven't owned the Sigma 30, but it seems not to be as highly regarded as the Sigma 60, and f/2.8 is not as useful indoors.

I have all the Sigma lenses, and I would rank them like this:

Sigma 30mm: Excellent!

Sigma 60mm: Somewhat soft wide open

Sigma 19mm: Not very sharp

This is the same ranking that Dpreview arrives at in their test of the three Sigma prime lenses.

The Olympus 45mm f/1.8 is cute and cheap, but not very well performing unless you stop it down to around f/2.5. Of course, if you don't pixel peep, you may be happy with the result wide open.

I haven't tried the Panasonic 42.5mm lens, but I would guess it fares well.

http://m43photo.blogspot.com

Thanks, it's good to hear a bit more about the Sigma lenses, It's kind of tempting particularly given their low price. They don't really come up on the second hand market much so they must be OK I guess.

The other end of the scale is the 45mm or 42.5mm Olympus and Panasonic respectively. I would have to try both to see what the differences are. I entertained a 60mm and 75mm lens but I don't think you'd ever got to use a lens that narrow anywhere except outdoors. The 45mm frame or even really 50mm is at the far limits of what I'd be comfortable with indoors.

Having F/1.7 or F/1.8 is always useful, I got this shot at F/1.7 just within the limits of standard ISO at ISO3200. If I didn't have a fast lens I'd have had to have resorted to a flash which would have burned out all the natural colours and lighting in this photo.

Even where I do use fill flash its only usually a tiny blip here it is +2 EV correction but you can see that there is no other light here than the orange lighting it kills the atmospheric lighting.

Of course this is just me and the way I see things. I tend to like the wider lens that captures the atmosphere even in environmental portraits. I feel much more of a connection o a photo like this than any traditional head and shoulders portrait. These shots create a narrative, I don't feel a connection with traditional portraiture.