I’m a fan of the 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary lens, but it isn’t perfect. In this video I talk about enjoying a beautiful Japanese styled garden while they had a Christmas holiday lighting event while doing photography with the Sigma 16mm and the Canon EOS M6 Mark II.
I’ve photographed this garden for years but always find unique ways to enjoy photography there! This lens is available for multiple mirrorless mounts. There would be slight field of view differences between this Canon EF-M version and the Sony, Fujifilm, and L-mount versions but other than that pretty similar.
Check out the Sigma 16mm f/1.4 DC DN Contemporary lens through my links:
B&H Photo Video, Amazon, Adorama, ebay, Walmart, and used on KEH. Or check out the trio of Sigma DC DN primes on B&H. Make sure you get the correct lens for your mount!
You can learn more about the lens on Sigma’s website too.
The largest flaw I see of the Sigma 16mm is on the edges of the frame when photographing landscape where the sky was white. There’s a pretty significant amount of color fringing.
Considering how big the lens it, it feels like you can focus pretty close. That in combination with the large aperture capability makes for an interesting look to the photos.
I generally think it’s a fine lens for photography, but I tend to use it more for video. It’s a good focal length on APS-C cameras at about arm’s length from the camera.
I’d like to pick one up for Sony E-Mount because the A6000 tends to be the camera I use for my PC recording and streaming rig.
Not sure how this turned into a talk about the lens! The garden lighting display was great and I’ll hopefully get a chance to see it again. I actually filmed that in 2021 instead of the most recent winter. It took me this long to get to it in my video project queue. Anderson Gardens did have the event again so I’d say there is a good chance.
Transcript of the related video:
Join me on a beautiful photo walk of a lighting display at Christmas time in a local Japanese styled garden.
https://youtu.be/garkrYhIqao
I was using the Canon EOS M6 Mark II with a 16 millimeter F/1.4 Sigma lens.
The main focus was just enjoying the beautiful lighting display, but taking photos is a nice addition.
This lens does suffer from aberrations especially visible with cloudy white skies.
Taking so many photos of this garden, but every time you see something new you see something interesting…
Considering the aps-c crop is a unique one, it’s still somewhat wide but not as wide as you might hope sometimes.
Although the nice large maximum aperture gives you a lot of flexibility.
Good combination, large aperture which is definitely nice in the night time.
It is a very large lens “chonky” on the M6 Mark II.
For the settings I was using aperture priority, simple enough.
This time of year it’s not especially exciting in the daytime but I made it work.
Still out there taking photos enjoying the photography itself.
I had the full mix of daylight hours into golden hour and then complete darkness…
The GoPro does struggle in the night time as you’ll see.
Stabilization starts to fall apart.
If you love RGB gaming PCs maybe.. maybe things like this will be a good match for you.
Take your camera out take some photos of all the RGB!
The sigma 16 millimeter is pretty nice up close.
Get photos of small berries, leaves, anything in the area that you notice… want to feature in your photo you get a nice blurred out background, get up close.
Of course shooting in aperture priority you have the option to adjust exposure compensation or just let the camera do its thing.
In this case it will expose for the sky sometimes which actually looks very nice.
The building lights in combination with the exterior lighting display was a good photo opportunity so I definitely took advantage of that.
Got dark enough that the lighting display was the key focus.
Then switched pretty much to F/1.4 to get the maximum amount of light into the camera.
The lighting display completely changes the dynamic of photography at the garden…
They created focal points with the lights and you notice different things as you walk around.
Even something moderately wide like the 16 millimeter on aps-c… so we get really low really high include foreground objects all those things can definitely increase the interest of the photo.
This was an enjoyable photo walk at one of my favorite places in the area to take photos.
Having the lighting display added a new dynamic to the photography, which was great!
Sigma 16 millimeter F/1.4 DC DN contemporary lens.
In this case on the EF-M mount.
It’s available for the Sony E-mount the L-mount and I think the Fujifilm mount, but uhh yeah!
I like the lens actually I wish I had it for the Sony E-mount as well just in video situations it’s really really nice.
The focal length I think works well for that considering all the crop and such.
I’m about arm’s length from the lens.
Looks good…
I’m actually at f/1.4, 1/60th of a second ISO 400, so I have two very not bright lights going on and then one in the background.
Obviously in the photo situations I don’t think it’s an amazing lens optically, but it’s at least for the EF-M mount you don’t have a lot of options…
So in this case I think it is a good general option for this specific mount.
Now if you get into the Sony E-mount, things like that, in photography situations you might want to look around make sure that it you know compares well to other options.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed this video I’m Scott of Photography Banzai, thanks!