One of the best things about having an ang mo friend is that every time he comes by to visit, I go wild at Amazon and order all the lenses and accessories I need and have them sent to him, and he’ll bring them over to Singapore. These things are much cheaper than if you were to buy them in Singapore, even if you include GST charges and the like. Moreover, Nikon honors international purchases of their lenses and accessories, so there’re no issues with warranty cards either.
Of the four items that Matt brought me this time, the item I’d been most looking forward to is the Sigma 10-20mm f/4.0-5.6 EX DC HSM. There’s quite a number of reviews for this lens, most of them very glowing e.g. this one, one or two of them less kind (e.g. Ken Rockwell’s). But all at least agree that the lens is very wide-angle, and great value for money for its span. I haven’t shot much with ultra wide-angle lenses like these before, so getting one and bringing it for the Pulau Ubin shoot let me have a lot of fun.
The lens is as good as it’s advertized, reported and reviewed. At 10mm, cropped factor not withstanding, there’s an amazing amount of stuff you can cram in. There’s a fair amount of barrel distortion, some of which I have to correct in Photoshop, especially if there’re persons in the shot and they’re not entirely dead centered. E.g. Ling looked real funny in one of those pictures shot at 10mm at the Pulau Ubin’s visitor’s centre. Colors turn out pretty well too, nicely saturated, and best of all, there’re no issues with sharpness for my needs. Ok, not as sharp as a prime lens, but I don’t blow my pictures up to poster size, and I don’t do much software cropping either.
The one thing that hasn’t turned out well though is uneven polarization with the B+W circular polarizer filter. Outside making sure that the sun is angled across my shoulders, there isn’t much I can do about this though, since it’s a matter of physics. The stuff is widely documented and commented upon, with two opposing views here and here. Those B+W filters sure are expensive, but they’re investments and can be reused with other lenses. And as long as I’m modest with how much I rotate the outer rim and don’t shoot at the widest angle, the uneven polarization isn’t too bad.
Here’re two shots from Monday’s trip to illustrate what I mean. The first one was shot at 18mm and is about OK, the second one at 10mm experienced slightly uneven polarization.
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