Old Kodak camera (taken with the Sigma 14mm lens)

On sunday we went to a camera bourse in Frankfurt. It was fun, fascinating and interesting. A lot of old stuff, partly usable, partly unusable, partly interesting, a lot of lenses, used analog and digital cameras, filters, strange equipment, books, old magazines and so on. I think the oldest “camera equipment” were some Laterna Magica and glass plate “cameras” with the appearance of a wooden box.

We bought some protection filter for our lenses and a +10 close up filter for the Nikkor AF-S DX VR 18-55 1:3,5-5,6G, which can be used this way as a poor man’s macro lens and it works fine. I tried close up filter (+2, +3 and +4) with my 18-200mm zoom lens last year but — as I read in a review — the results are interesting because of the soft blurriness, but not comparable with real macro shots. This orchid is slightly motion blurred, I did use a tripod but not a remote control to release the shutter and it was just to get an impression what can be done with this +10 close up filter. The colorful structure of this flower is not much bigger than 1 cm.

Sigma 14mm 2.8D HSM

But the highlight was this Sigma 14mm f/2.8 wide angle lens. I really like wide angle photographs. And I miss it as the 18mm of my zoom lens results in effective 27mm because of the Nikon DX crop factor. The lens looks great and feels great, it is built of metal and really heavy glass. There is notable chromatic abberation at the outer areas using lower f-stops but the sharpness is great. The distortion is not extreme (I don’t want a fish eye effect). And you can get really close to a subject with this lens. Up to a few centimeters.

Wide angle landscape on my way to work (taken with the Sigma 14mm lens)