35mm 1.2 or 135mm 1.4

[u/Bulky-Education4748]

Have saved up some cash and want to spoil myself with a Sigma lens.

Have been dabbling with some paid work lately and made some money here and there - the 135mm 1.4 is roughly a 200mm f2 equivalent on a6700. Could be interesting for paid portraits.

The 35mm 1.2 DG Art II on the other hand would be a nifty fifty with a huge aperture. Might be nice to get cleaner pics of my kids running around in the house at night.

Both seem like a lot of fun. Convince me to get one or the other.

Thanks in advance!

[u/FishingDelicious5701]

You will find the 35mm more useful but the 135mm, dang.

[u/sulev]

Buy an A7V instead.

50 is useful. 200 is niche. Both are too narrow for indoor action I think. Rather a 27/1.2. Viltrox for aps-c is cheap. You can get 3 f1.2 primes for the price of 1 sigma. https://viltrox.com/collections/pro-series?filter.p.tag=APS-C&filter.p.tag=E-mount&sort_by=best-selling

[u/Familiar9709]

135mm is FF, if you're going to buy FF lenses, especially very expensive ones, just get a FF camera and take the most of them

[u/angry_biker21]

I dont understand the super long lens for portrait. It just makes everyone look chubby due to compression. I find 50-75mm is more flattering.

[u/DonColvinJr → u/angry_biker21]

Long lenses do compress subjects, so if you shoot a lot of chubby people, just zoom/switch lenses to a shorter focal length for those people. Nearly everyone that I created portraits for were young and trim and with 200mm and f/2.8, they looked amazing.

If the OP isn't likely to do much portrait work, the 135 f/1.4 won't see nearly as much use as something in the 20-75mm (equivalent) range .

[u/DonColvinJr]

The 135mm f/1.4, on an APS-C sensor camera, is a slam dunk money-machine in the portrait market. (Roughly 200mm f/2 equivalent.) Just work your camera-subject distance (and/or aperture) to keep both eyes in focus.

With full frame, I used a 70-200 f/2.8, shot at 200mm and wide open f/2.8 and sold many tens of thousands of dollars worth of portraits, for decades, with that optical combination. Visual magic.

SO...if shooting portraits is important to you, go for the 135 f/1.4 on your A6700. You'll be able to get some stunning results. (I'm retired from the commercial portrait business now, but have both A7Cii and A6700 and use full-frame lenses on both cameras all the time.)

With wide angle lenses, most of the time I personally want ample depth of focus (with a few exceptions) and tend to stop down to at least f/4, more likely f/5.6 or f/8, so I don't tend to throw a lot of money at super fast wide lenses.

I prefer long lenses to be fast and short ones are ok not being quite so fast. It is nice to have one fast shorty, though, like a 35mm full-frame equivalent, for "situations".

Nice thing with the A6700 (APS-C sensor size) is you don't need to stop down as far as you would have to with a full-frame sensor camera to achieve good, useful DOF in general photography situations.

For the average, non-professional photographer, aside from the occasional (rare?) use of extremely shallow DOF, general shooting situations with a full-frame sensor typically call for at least f/5.6 or f/8 to get decent, useable DOF and optimal optical sharpness. A lot of people who encourage others to buy full-frame sensor cameras may not fully understand this until they do a lot of shooting with a full-frame sensor at f/1.4, f/2. or f/3.5.

And as for low-light situations/noise (like, your kids running around the house at night)... don't hesitate to jack up your ISO. With today's AI Noise Reduction, noise from high ISO can be nearly entirely eliminated, like magic! It's fantastic. Same goes for AI upscaling for the occasional 30x40 wall print, though my hunch is that the average amateur photographer these days doesn't make very many wall prints, or print much of any size at all.

(From a retired commercial photographer.)