We took a little break recently and spent 36 hours in Charleston, SC to do some sightseeing and shopping. I brought my Sigma 105mm lens to see how it performs as a walking-around lens, and I was pretty surprised by how well it did. Obviously, it did macros well, as it's a macro lens, but it was also really sharp when I was capturing landscapes and some movement. I hadn't used this lens like this yet, and I feel like I got a lot out of it. There were a couple of hitches - for some reason, the exposure would sometimes plummet between exposures, even though I didn't change settings, and the lens 'hunted' when my focus point wasn't over a subject that had clear, contrast-y edges. As with every lens, it just meant I needed to adjust where I was shooting, back myself up if I was too close, and shoot with the idea of how I'd edit it in post.

Walking around with a new lens, forcing myself to use it, is the best way for me to see what it can do. It seems obvious, but it's a step I have to force myself to take - I like to fall back on a couple of my power-horse zoom lenses because I know how they will perform and give me a lot of flexibility.

My first images were just a test - as a 105mm, I didn't really know what the distance would look like when I wasn't doing a macro shot. They weren't great.

Since we were in a beautiful place on a lovely day, I took some macros of the flowers we passed by. It was super windy - take a look at the shutter speeds on these images. They are not perfectly framed due to the wind, and I abandoned this idea pretty quickly. These flowers were right along the river and the wind was just too strong to have any sort of consistency.

Walking around, looking for alligators, I took these images to see how the lens would work as a landscape lens.

This brings us to my favorite spot, the Rookery. It is nesting season, and the Rookery was a swamp with a couple of trees filled with nesting birds. Bird wars between egrets, a nesting egret carrying sticks for its nest, and other nesting birds I can't identify filled those trees. A line of photographers with zoom lenses and mirrorless cameras were there to capture the action - this is a link to one of them.