On Friday I purchased my new used lens, a Sigma 30mm ƒ/1.4 prime.
It’s fun using a lens with such a large maximum aperture: natural light photography is possible without bumping up the ISO.
The Sigma is pretty big and heavy, a change from the featherweight 18-55 kit lens. The petal lens shade nearly doubles the length of the lens when mounted on the camera.
The angle of view for this lens is equivalent to that of a 45mm lens on a 135-format camera. This is a little wider than the “normal” 50mm and I’m not really used to it yet.
This Sigma is the fastest prime that’ll autofocus on the D40. If I’d had a Nikon with a screw-type AF I’d perhaps gone with a 35mm ƒ/2 instead. That’s a smaller lens, but the smallest camera which has that AF is the D80 which is chunkier than my camera. Life is full of trade-offs.
Ken Rockwell has a damning-with-faint-praise review here. Some other reviewers have gotten lenses with misaligned focus. I did some improvised testing and it seems to be OK.
Here’s a pic of Viking with this lens. He looks sad, but he’s actually just thoughtful.
