The Portrait Lens to End All Portrait Lenses： Shooting with the new Sigma 135mm F1.4

This video is brought to you by Squarespace, the number one website platform for entrepreneurs. This is the world's first 135mm f1.4 with autofocus. This is Sofia. Hi. And we're going to see what this thing can do. Alright, this is a bit of a prototype here, but I'm trying to get rid of the light stands. So I have this shopping cart and I got this idea actually from somebody on Instagram. I'll put his name up there. Shout out to him. This is a great idea. Shopping cart, light, mobile light studio. Biggest dilemma is when I'm testing out a lens is do I go for like a really good shot? Do I actually try hard or do I come up with like good comparison shots? So I'm going to try to do a little bit of both. Here I have a little bit of rim light, so I'm going to take advantage of the rim light. I'm going to have you stand up against the fence here. I'm going to probably stand like a mile away. Okay, so when I first, when I take my first test shots, I make sure that my flash trigger is off. I make sure my flash is off. I pretend like this doesn't even exist. I'm going to take some natural light photos first because I wanted to determine what my background is going to look like and I want her face to be a little bit in shadow because I'm going to light her face with the flash. So we're two exposures here. My first exposure, my background exposure, and now we turn on the flash and now we dial in the perfect flash power. One, two, three, good, one, two. Now what's crazy is that like 10 years ago, the Minikon, Minikon released the 135 1.4, but it was manual focus. It weighed like six pounds, cost like $3,000 and I, for that reason I thought we were never going to see one of these lenses and I'm really surprised at how small and lightweight this lens is compared to what Minikon made 10 years ago. Okay, now I'm switching to the Sony 135 1.8 for comparison shot. So this new Sigma lens weighs around 1400 grams and this lens has 13 aperture blades. I don't know of any other modern lens that has 13 aperture blades. Let's go to the second shot. Now this one is going to be more to really highlight the background blur. So I'm going to shoot you at an angle here, get all the city and all that in the background and see, you know, how, how they compare. So I think you're going to stay in the same, in the same area, I'm going to move the light over here. I'll tell you what's impressive about the design here. Sigma was able to make this lens that no one else has ever made. They made it even lighter than the 105 millimeter F 1.4. When looking at both of these images, look at the bridge behind her over her left shoulder. Look at how melted away the background looks when compared to the Sony. We're going to just have her, you know, just stand on the railing like that. The old Instagram 2015 Instagram days, we're going to use natural light on this one. We're going to just use the sun because obviously I can't mount the flash, can't boom it over the railing. So that's what we're going to do. Now according to YouTube, damn near every lens is the king of bokeh nowadays, but speaking objectively here, I don't think there is a lens on the 200 millimeter with autofocus that can compete with this lens. Okay. So, I mean, I'm, I'm running out of options here because again, it's very, very limiting. It's very hard to use, especially with flash. Got this cool staircase here. This is not the kind of shot that I would want to take naturally, but I think it'll make for a good comparison shot. There's a lot of foreground. There's a lot of foreground railing here. So let's just work with what we got. Looking off to your right like that. In my off-camera flash mini course, which you can check out down below, I show you how you can use your modifier to create your own shade. When you can't keep the sun behind the model. Now these photos that I shot when it was overcast, they look good, but the ones where I shot where the sun was shining, these are my favorite because I was able to get that nice flattering light on her while everything around her had a glow to it. No, it's getting covered again. ****. Okay. So the model actually left. Sophia left, but I called her back and like, Hey, come back cause we got the sun, sun's back out. And what makes this sun, what makes this shot so nice is the fact that the sun is illuminating everything around her. You've got a lot of warm tones and then she's got warm tones as well with the gold and the tan shirt. It all really looks, it looks, it comes, it comes together so nicely. It's good. Oh yeah. Thanks for coming back and solidifying the best ones. Okay. All the images are imported. It's time for me to start pixel peeping and it's time for you to start peeping. How are you going to finally going to start a website with Squarespace? So they absolutely make creating a website, online store, even a personal blog, easy for anyone to set up and manage on their own. Like I've, I've never come across another service that is this seamless. I use Squarespace for everything, right? It's where my portfolio lives. It's where I can show off my best work without it getting compressed to hell on Instagram. It's where I manage my online store and where I sell my online presets and it's even where I sell my off camera flash mini course that I created all on my own, leveraging all of their new AI design tools and features, right? If I had any questions, I could just simply reach out because they offer 24 seven customer support, no more waiting. Okay, go ahead and try it now and if you love it, use the code Manny for 10% off. I think we all can agree here that the biggest selling point of the 135 1.4 is the aperture and the amount of background blur that can be achieved using a lens like this. I'm not going to lie, pooling in the images, I was actually, I was genuinely shocked at how much more background blur you can get and how much more subject, the subject isolation that you can get with the 1.4 compared to the 1.8 for sure, but there's more to a lens than just background blur. So I'm going to look at some of those things first because I've been doing so many medium format videos and looking at Hasselblad, you know, quality medium format photos with their lenses. I really trained my eye to really look for that 3d pop, that 3d rendering that includes, you know, lenses with that have micro contrast and okay, so let's start with sharpness. The Sony 135 GM is the slightly sharper lens for sure, but it requires me to zoom into like 200% to really see the difference there. When comparing how they render, the Sigma does lean more on the warmer side, which is something that most of their lenses do in an auto white balance. And if you look really close to the shots, the Sony does have more micro contrast and that 3d pop that really makes the image look more realistic. However, I can still see a lot of people preferring the image coming out of the Sigma because even though it's razor sharp, it produces a slightly more flattering image straight out of camera because the skin has a slightly more softened look. Both lenses also control aberrations very well. I mean, I really had to, where is Waldo in these images? I got to really try to find something. The aberrations around the model's hair and around the jewelry are really clean throughout all the images. I could, I found the slightest aberrations in the railings, you know, where you can't even tell until you zoom in 200%. And for the most important part of this comparison, right, the main reason why anyone would pick up the Sigma 135 1.4 over everything else right now is for this background blur. First of all, I don't know of any other modern lens out there that has 13 aperture blades. The Sony has a wimpy 11 aperture blade, but this one has 13 and it shows it. It looks like it has 13. It is amazing to me how much a fraction of a stop difference in aperture can make in background blur, right? Like I've never once thought to myself, like I wasn't getting enough background blur with the 135 1.8, but man, this right here is next level 3D cutout look, you know, I mean, look at the bridge behind her. It just melts away on the Sigma, whereas on the GM, you can still see the outlines of the bokeh balls. It's absolutely mad. I'll tell you what, this lens has a big, beautiful front element. This takes 105 millimeter filters. You can see the 13 aperture blades really clearly. It's, it's a, it's, it's beautiful, honestly. Now on the lens itself, it's pretty simple, pretty straightforward. You've got an AF-MS switch, got two focus hold buttons. You got an aperture ring, then an aperture ring lock switch. You also have a tripod collar. Even though this lens weighs 1,420 grams, it's a very, it's a very short and compact lens. So you don't really feel the weight when you're using it. Now, I just can't get over though, that Sigma was able to price this lens under $2,000, given that there's nothing else out there, nothing else out there to really compete with, you know, it's a first of its kind, right? The Sony 135 1.8, it's a little bit over 2,000. The Viltrox, which this is, this is what makes it tough. Viltrox makes an excellent 135 1.8 for under $1,000 and 135 millimeter isn't an easy lens to use. You need a lot of working distance and because you're shooting and especially if you're shooting vertical format, the moment the model goes like this, you're going to cut that off. You got to, you got to step even farther back and that's why the 135 is just really hard to use. Now, if I had this focal length on a medium format camera like the Hasselblad, it'd be easier because I could shoot in a four by three, more of a boxy aspect ratio and I could, I have more room on the, on the edges and I talk about this all the time, the 200 millimeter being my holy grail lens and it's my holy grail lens. I don't use it very often, but I call it my holy grail because it's that lens that I go to when I want to like completely wow somebody with the look. This is the kind of holy grail lens for portrait photographers that, that is actually attainable, right? I mean, the Sigma is not that much more money. It's around three, you know, over three grand, but this is under two grand. I could see this being like that holy grail lens, the lens that you pull out when you're like, Hey, I want to obliterate the background. I want to make this person look at this and make it like it looks fake when they look at the back of the screen. This can do it for you. Okay. All right. Thank you. Take care.