Sigma SD1 at the Barbican
The weather in the UK these last couple of weeks has been suboptimal. Grey skies and almost continual rain. I braved a trip to the Barbican in the City of London, but to get the best from the SD1 you really need good light which is not what I had that day. Here are a few phtotographs shot that day, captured with the SD1 coupled wtih one of my favourite lenses for it, the Sigma 150mm f/2.8 APO Macro.
The colours from the SD1’s Foveon sensor are, to me, quite distinctive. The greens, the blues in particular. I’m not saying they are better than any other camera, just subtly different.
The Barbican is a little oasis in the heart of London. The buildings are all constructed out of concrete, people either love them or hate them. Mostly they hate them! But the water features there are a nice contrast to all the concrete, and a heron is a frequent visitor.
I wouldn’t recommend the SD1 as a wildlife camera, the camera is incredibly slow to process and save images once you press the shutter, and you have a very small, low definition LCD screen on the back if you want to review images afterwards. But there was something rather gratifying in a masochistic kind of way in having to slow down so much, choose carefully what to shoot and wait for the right moment rather than the normal DSLR spray-and-pray technique.
As for the 150mm lens, it performed brilliantly. Autofocus worked fine but slowly like everything else about this camera. However I much prefer to focus manually and the viewfinder of the SD1 gives good magnification, I did not have a problem getting correct focus which is something I can not say about much more expensive cameras from the same era that I used to own.
All in all I was happy with the results given that the light was terrible and the weather so miserable. But most importantly, the whole experience of shooting with the SD1 was a pleasurable one. I feared that the sluggishness of the camera might get me frustrated but it actually had the opposite effect. Maybe that’s just a sign of me getting old! But I enjoyed the experience of slowing down, shooting less, trusting the exposure and focus rather than “chimping” all the time, and I have even started to entertain thoughts of shooting with film again, perhaps even 4×5 large format….
