Well, it's not "Three Generations" quite in the same way as this shot or this one, but you get the idea.

As you can tell by my lean posting schedule of late, I'm buried with work on my Lightroom plugins, hoping Lr3 doesn't come out before I'm ready. But I had the opportunity to use an amazing lens today, and took it for a short stroll near my place.

The lens -- an all-manual Cosina Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 -- is a full 100% macro, something I'd never used before. I got close with the 64% macro of the Sigma Bigma [...]

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I got back today the lens I sent to Sigma a week ago. They replied that they couldn't reproduce any of the problems I reported (which doesn't surprise me, because it was so intermittent and unpredictable) but sent me a new one as a replacement.

We'll see how it goes... hopefully this one won't freak out like the first.

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So, I've written a lot lately about my new lens, a Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm OS, including:

Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom (now with OS) Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm Super-tele Zoom, Part II So, Just How Bigma is the Sigma? My New Sigma "Bigma", Day 2 I Laugh at Your Puny 500mm Lens: Sigma Bigma at 1,000mm Walkabout with the Sigma Bigma: Versatility Galore Sigma Bigma's New Optical Stabilization

Reading theses, I hope it's obvious that I think it's a great lens that I love using, but there are, unfortunately, a few issues that I've been chronicling on the "Just [...]
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The photo immediately above is the Mt. Daimonji “大" visible from much of Kyoto. For comparison, this next shot was taken from about the same place, at 24 mm (as opposed to the 1,000mm of the picture above), from my Discovering Kyoto's Mt. Yoshida post a year ago...

Yesterday I offered some samples of Sigma's new "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom with the 2× teleconverter attached, turning it into a 100-1,000mm f/9-f/13 zoom that also works as an almost 1-to-1 macro. I noted that first impressions were that using the teleconverter ("TC") lowers the optical quality considerably, and today's equally-informal tests support [...]

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I've been busy busy busy with Lightroom plugin stuff and so haven't gotten much time to play with my new Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom, but I wanted to post a few samples taken with the Sigma APO Teleconverter 2x EX DG attached, turning the Bigma into a 100-1,000mm f/9-f/13 zoom.

These aren't from a proper test... I just set the camera+teleconverter+lens's substantial mass on a table and pointed it out the open window, turned the lens' optical stabilization off, and fired off some shots....

The viewfinder was surprisingly bright for f/9, though the out-of-focus areas had all kinds of annoying [...]

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