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Using a Sigma 85mm f1.4 EX With Kodak Portra 400

Chris Gampat
3 Comments
12/14/2011
2 Mins read
Chris Gampat The Phoblographer Sigma 85mm f1.4 EX with Kodak Portra 400 (11 of 11)

Before I unhappily sent the Sigma 85mm f1.4 EX back to the company, I affixed it to Nathan Blaney’s Canon 1N and loaded up some Kodak Portra 400. Why? I wanted to see just how well the lens did when shooting film instead of digital. Though I loved the look of the lens on my 5D Mk II, it needed to be tested on a film camera.

Indoors with Available Light

Portra, besides being an extremely sharp film, also captures lots of great details and maintains accurate and true color balance when developed correctly.

However, when you put the Sigma 85mm f1.4 EX on, you’ll need to hope that the lens accurately focuses on your intended target. Indeed, sometimes the lens focused and sometimes it didn’t. Even when it did focus, it was sometimes slightly off. Perhaps this has something to do with the 1N or the lens itself. On my 5D Mk II, it almost never misfocused.

Wide open, the lens still performs admirably. In the photo above, I’m shooting wide open as opposed to the previous photo where I stopped down to around f3.5.

It is also important to note that the lens doesn’t vignette at all when shooting wide open with film. On a full frame sensor though, it does. Here’s an example:

Sigma 85mm at ISO 400 f1.4 and 1/800

The above photo was shot with my Canon 5D Mk II at f1.4. Notice the vignetting? This has to do with the fact that 35mm full frame sensors are slightly smaller than an exposure of 35mm film. They also render quite differently as you can see. With digital, you get super sharp results while film gives you a softness in the skin that is still quite sharp where it needs to be.

Outdoors with Strobe Lighting at Night

Shooting wide open at night time with a 580 EX II attached to the 1N is actually quite a bit tougher than it looks. First off, this is a long focal length, so in order to get any sort of unblurred results I needed to shoot at around 1/100th. However, ISO 400 is too slow for low light like this. So I needed to let more light in via the shutter speed. Then I needed to balance the strobe aimed against a wall with the aperture. The results are the photos you see here.

This wasn’t easy at all, but it was made possible by the fact that Portra can be pushed to achieve excellent results. Here are a couple more photos.

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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