p.1 #1 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
I recently decided to get an ultrazoom lens for skitouring and hiking. Debated between the Tamron 28-200, 25-200 and Sigma 20-200. Since I settled for the Sigma, here's a report on how it did on a first skitouring and skiing trip around La Grave, France.
Short summary: I'm very pleased with it!
- I rarely have time to change lenses when I'm touring. Having a 20-200 zoom was SO helpful
- it's light (for such a zoom ratio). When you hike a vertical of 1500m+ some days, it makes a big difference. Also, small enough for the backpack, and easy to carry on a sling when going uphill
- sharpness, for me, is very good for this type of shots (I could get better with my 16-35 and 70-200 GM2, but I wouldn't carry them on most tours)
- I very rarely need subject separation - in fact most likely I'm at f8-f10.
(Mild) negatives:
- a strong and tricky vignette that's not eliminated anywhere close to enough by the standard Lightroom profile
- I sometimes forgot it wasn't stabilised so I missed some shots early morning (also forgot that I was using my A9 which has vastly inferior sensor stabilisation compared to my A7R5).
Things that didn't matter for this usage: distortion at 20mm.
Here are a few selected shots; I include both landscape shots and action shots (going both up and down) to show the range of what I'm using it for.
All processed in Lightroom to my liking, some with a bit of cropping.
These ones aren't at 20mm, so you may rightly ask if I needed something that wide, but I did use it. Let me know if you want to see examples.
p.1 #2 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
i spent like 30 minutes on a reply but it crashed and didn't load, so here's a quick second take...
awesome work. i have resort skied with an a9/a1 in the past using the original 70-200g and 100-400gm. i also heli ski in BC every march. but this year i worked up the courage to try combining the two. obviously you are touring and i am mechanized, so weight is less of an issue to me, but i juuust barely chose the tamron 50-400 over the sigma 20-200. the 50mm was generally wide enough (the 100-400 always felt a little too tight but the 70-200 was pretty good for me in the past), but i am sure i could have come away with some awesome shots at 20mm too! ultimately i chose the tamron for fast action auto focus. i haven't used the 20-200 for action yet, but i feel sony>tamron>sigma in my experience when it comes to fast action AF. i will have to give the sigma a spin while resort skiing sometime though. stabilization wasn't a huge factor as i lived at 1/1000-1/2000 and f8 and my iso never went above a few hundred (even in cloud cover).
i am super happy with my camera gear, but more importantly i rigged up a perfect ski camera bag. obviously there's a backpack with avy gear, so i converted a thinktank speedtop crossbody sling bag to a hip bag/glorified fanny pack. i cut off the shoulder strap and ran a shimoda hip belt through a pass-through in the back and used some adhesive velcro. this allowed me to rotate the bag from front to side easily to grab the camera or ski. the magnetic lid is super fast and pretty secure but can be fully locked down if falling is more likely. i basically strapped collapsible poles away when photographing and got them out to ski and only switched "modes" a few times a day. this was necessary for the fast pace of loading/unloading the heli and getting action photos of a group of riders, but it would be easy enough to just set poles aside for landscapes or skinning uphill. anyways i am the skier in blue if you want to check out my setup.
p.1 #4 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
Luballs wrote:
i spent like 30 minutes on a reply but it crashed and didn't load, so here's a quick second take...
awesome work. i have resort skied with an a9/a1 in the past using the original 70-200g and 100-400gm. i also heli ski in BC every march. but this year i worked up the courage to try combining the two. obviously you are touring and i am mechanized, so weight is less of an issue to me, but i juuust barely chose the tamron 50-400 over the sigma 20-200. the 50mm was generally wide enough (the 100-400 always felt a little too tight but the 70-200 was pretty good for me in the past), but i am sure i could have come away with some awesome shots at 20mm too! ultimately i chose the tamron for fast action auto focus. i haven't used the 20-200 for action yet, but i feel sony>tamron>sigma in my experience when it comes to fast action AF. i will have to give the sigma a spin while resort skiing sometime though. stabilization wasn't a huge factor as i lived at 1/1000-1/2000 and f8 and my iso never went above a few hundred (even in cloud cover).
i am super happy with my camera gear, but more importantly i rigged up a perfect ski camera bag. obviously there's a backpack with avy gear, so i converted a thinktank speedtop crossbody sling bag to a hip bag/glorified fanny pack. i cut off the shoulder strap and ran a shimoda hip belt through a pass-through in the back and used some adhesive velcro. this allowed me to rotate the bag from front to side easily to grab the camera or ski. the magnetic lid is super fast and pretty secure but can be fully locked down if falling is more likely. i basically strapped collapsible poles away when photographing and got them out to ski and only switched "modes" a few times a day. this was necessary for the fast pace of loading/unloading the heli and getting action photos of a group of riders, but it would be easy enough to just set poles aside for landscapes or skinning uphill. anyways i am the skier in blue if you want to check out my setup....Show more →
p.1 #5 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
Very nice! Can you walk us through how you ended with the 20-200 over the others? I've been thinking of going 25-200, but 20mm vs 25 is pretty big! Would love to see some more 20mm examples.
jaggedhorizon wrote:
I recently decided to get an ultrazoom lens for skitouring and hiking. Debated between the Tamron 28-200, 25-200 and Sigma 20-200. Since I settled for the Sigma, here's a report on how it did on a first skitouring and skiing trip around La Grave, France.
Short summary: I'm very pleased with it!
- I rarely have time to change lenses when I'm touring. Having a 20-200 zoom was SO helpful
- it's light (for such a zoom ratio). When you hike a vertical of 1500m+ some days, it makes a big difference. Also, small enough for the backpack, and easy to carry on a sling when going uphill
- sharpness, for me, is very good for this type of shots (I could get better with my 16-35 and 70-200 GM2, but I wouldn't carry them on most tours)
- I very rarely need subject separation - in fact most likely I'm at f8-f10.
(Mild) negatives:
- a strong and tricky vignette that's not eliminated anywhere close to enough by the standard Lightroom profile
- I sometimes forgot it wasn't stabilised so I missed some shots early morning (also forgot that I was using my A9 which has vastly inferior sensor stabilisation compared to my A7R5).
Things that didn't matter for this usage: distortion at 20mm.
Here are a few selected shots; I include both landscape shots and action shots (going both up and down) to show the range of what I'm using it for.
All processed in Lightroom to my liking, some with a bit of cropping.
These ones aren't at 20mm, so you may rightly ask if I needed something that wide, but I did use it. Let me know if you want to see examples.
p.1 #6 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
Luballs wrote:
i spent like 30 minutes on a reply but it crashed and didn't load, so here's a quick second take...
awesome work. i have resort skied with an a9/a1 in the past using the original 70-200g and 100-400gm. i also heli ski in BC every march. but this year i worked up the courage to try combining the two. obviously you are touring and i am mechanized, so weight is less of an issue to me, but i juuust barely chose the tamron 50-400 over the sigma 20-200. the 50mm was generally wide enough (the 100-400 always felt a little too tight but the 70-200 was pretty good for me in the past), but i am sure i could have come away with some awesome shots at 20mm too! ultimately i chose the tamron for fast action auto focus. i haven't used the 20-200 for action yet, but i feel sony>tamron>sigma in my experience when it comes to fast action AF. i will have to give the sigma a spin while resort skiing sometime though. stabilization wasn't a huge factor as i lived at 1/1000-1/2000 and f8 and my iso never went above a few hundred (even in cloud cover).
i am super happy with my camera gear, but more importantly i rigged up a perfect ski camera bag. obviously there's a backpack with avy gear, so i converted a thinktank speedtop crossbody sling bag to a hip bag/glorified fanny pack. i cut off the shoulder strap and ran a shimoda hip belt through a pass-through in the back and used some adhesive velcro. this allowed me to rotate the bag from front to side easily to grab the camera or ski. the magnetic lid is super fast and pretty secure but can be fully locked down if falling is more likely. i basically strapped collapsible poles away when photographing and got them out to ski and only switched "modes" a few times a day. this was necessary for the fast pace of loading/unloading the heli and getting action photos of a group of riders, but it would be easy enough to just set poles aside for landscapes or skinning uphill. anyways i am the skier in blue if you want to check out my setup....Show more →
Hey that's some good form in that shot of you! I usually end up being the photographer rather than the one being photographed, or if I'm in the photo it's taken with a phone most times.
Indeed mechanised vs self-powered uphill makes a difference. At various times I carried a 100-400, a 24-105 etc, a 70-200 GM2, a 16-35... even a combination of small primes! But with my group of non-photographer friends, if I'm not fast I don't take the photo at all, most times.
I like your carry system, need to figure out if I can implement it!
p.1 #7 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
BigBabyMoses06 wrote:
Very nice! Can you walk us through how you ended with the 20-200 over the others? I've been thinking of going 25-200, but 20mm vs 25 is pretty big! Would love to see some more 20mm examples.
Thank you!
I spent quite a bit of time thinking about 25-200 vs 20-200 (either of which was a replacement for my 24-105). If it was just for hiking, I'd probably have gone with the 25-200, adding my Viltrox 14/4. But I think what swung it was the need to be fast when I'm skitouring with my friends... they're happy that I take photos, but not if I take forever to change lenses etc. And if I'm going uphill, every time I stop they won't wait for me, so again I better be quick.
The negatives (mainly smaller aperture) didn't matter so much for my main use. Ultimately, I thought about which one I would regret more, if I got the other one.
It's a personal thing, and although I really like ultrawides, at least during this trip I wouldn't have missed any great shots if I had a 25-200. The last one in my first post above is at 20mm (which also gives me a reasonable sunstar). Here are a few more:
Going up:
Early morning at the Refuge des Aiguilles d'Arves
Pano stitched from 20mm shots:
(to be fair, it could probably have been taken at 25mm stitching more vertical shots rather than fewer horizontal ones)
p.1 #8 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
jaggedhorizon wrote:
Hey that's some good form in that shot of you! I usually end up being the photographer rather than the one being photographed, or if I'm in the photo it's taken with a phone most times.
Indeed mechanised vs self-powered uphill makes a difference. At various times I carried a 100-400, a 24-105 etc, a 70-200 GM2, a 16-35... even a combination of small primes! But with my group of non-photographer friends, if I'm not fast I don't take the photo at all, most times.
I like your carry system, need to figure out if I can implement it!
haha i have one friend that trades me camera for poles a few times but there were about 20 photos of me and 5k of my group. i absolutely hear you on simplicity/focal range and low weight as i extensively backpack and do some light mountaineering when not skiing. i will have to give the 20-200 a whirl for action soon
p.1 #9 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
HelBen85 wrote:
Beautiful pictures!
What lens do you use (currently) and why?
thanks. these were entirely one trip using the tamron 50-400. i had an excellent copy of the 100-400gm and used it for skiing before, but the 100mm wide end is pretty limiting. the 50mm wide end makes a difference and usually feels just fine (i would love wider, but it was never an issue starting at 50mm). the size/weight advantage of the 50-400 is nice compared to the 100-400, and the 100-400 probably would not have fit in my thinktank fanny pack, but the 100-400 didn't actually bother me either.
the 100-400gm is definitely faster focusing and sharper. i was not wow'ed by the straight raws coming out of the 50-400 when first opening the files, as this was actually my first time using the lens. however i was always fine with the results after editing, so it really is "good enough." as for autofocus, i made the bet that the 50-400 would beat the 20-200 and i think i was right. i definitely dropped a few shots in a sequence that the 100-400gm probably wouldn't have, but if i had the focus area and mode right on my end it hit 80-90%. that might be abysmal to a pro sports photographer, but i hate culling bursts of images more than anything else, so i don't mind a dropped shot or two making my job easier. heck, i don't even shoot my a1 at 30 fps ever. i never use more than 10-15 fps and already hate culling those.
oh, i also counted on the tamron being maybe better weather sealed than the 20-200? but who knows. the camera and lens were constantly covered in snow and i never worried about it and never had issues
p.1 #10 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
BigBabyMoses06 wrote:
Very nice! Can you walk us through how you ended with the 20-200 over the others? I've been thinking of going 25-200, but 20mm vs 25 is pretty big! Would love to see some more 20mm examples.
i was 95% set on getting the 25-200 to replace my 28-200 and went into the local camera store on a rainy day and just happened to try the 20-200 to compare. i spent an hour shooting out the front door into the neighborhood and reviewing the shots back and forth on my rear lcd. the sales guy just wanted me to return one if i didn't like it but i insisted on getting the right one and kept shooting. i felt a sinking feeling i was screwing up as i walked out with the 20-200, but it looked sliiightly sharper to me. i have not been disappointed yet, but i mentioned previously i have only used the 20-200 a handfull of days and liked midrange/close shots a lot but need to see if the infinity focus is that good, as one hike left me kinda underwhelmed with it after being pleasantly surprised previously. could have been atmospheric issues. i still feel pretty good about the choice over the 25-200. for this trip i don't regret taking the 50-400 over it though
p.1 #11 · Sigma 20-200: great for skitouring (and hiking?)
I really like my Sigma 20-200. Had the 28-200 for the longest time on my A7CR for travel. While I liked it, I didn't love it. Took a chance on the 20-200 when it came out... now I can't take it off my travel camera. It's just so useful and I like the images a lot more than the Tamron. They just seem sharper and "punchier" to me.
