At the Japanese Summer Festival (3)

@Babul Bhatt: Thanks, Babul. You mention the lens, and I can tell you that I'm delighted with my Sigma. You'll see that many of my earlier photos were taken with the original version of this lens, with no stabilizer. I had been plannning to buy either a short zoom with a stabilizer or a fast, fairly wide prime lens to use when there was not enough light for the Sigma zoom. Then they came out with the OS (optical stabilizer) version, which is actually a totally redesigned model. In my case, there is no option from Canon to compete with this. In any case, I couldn't be happier. I haven't taken it off the camera at all since I bought it last November. It suits my style of photography, hate of carrying too much and having to juggle lenses and camera body in the street. It may not have the ultimate sharpness throughout the entire range at all apertures but, as far as I'm concerned, the results speak for themselves.

The bottom line is that I can zoom from the equivalent of 28 to 300mm in a split second, never miss anything, use 300mm in quite bad light and easily use the wide angle end in low light at 1600 ISO down to 1/8 or 1/4 of a second with care, if I need to.These are my priorities, you see.

I'll take out my 50mm f1.8 Canon (= 80mm in 35 mm format) if I'm ever going to do a portrait session, and I may buy a very wide angle prime lens in the future for architectural work, as I suppose this could give me a little extra sharpness in certain photos, although I'm certainly not disappointed with the results I'm getting at the moment with the Sigma.

@Emilio Garcia: Thanks, Emilio. I did think about the background on seeing the photo on screen. Perhaps I should have tried it wide open, although at that focal length, the maximum is only f6.3. I habitually use f8, though, because it seems to give about the sharpest result.

@Nick Passantino: Thank you, Nick. I've been to your photos on VFXY, too.