Sigma 120-300 for Canon EF mount. I do miss this range of telephoto goodness.
For many years my go to lens for nature photography, especially for lower light conditions, was the Sigma 120-300 f/2.8. This was by far the sharpest lens I had ever owned at least until the Canon 500 f/4 II. At the time on my 5D II and 1DIV the autofocus was pretty reasonable, at times a little slower to track than my Canon lenses but even with the 1.4 and 2 times teleconverters it was very usable.
Great Grey Owl hunting in a farmer’s field near dusk on a very cold winter day. Taken with Canon 1D IV with Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 and 2x teleconverter.
At the time I was shooting owls and needed something that was capable of keeping the ISO down to a maximum of 1600 for as long as possible as those cameras really started to get noisy past that point. My Canon 100-400 push-pull at the time was a much lighter lens, and the focus was a bit faster but the image quality just was not in the same ballpark and the smaller apertures made it not as useful at dusk or dawn.
Canon 1D IV with Sigma 12-300 and 2x Teleconverter at 600mm. Even cropped in this lens made the best out of the APS-H 16Mpixel sensor.
As I moved to mirrorless cameras over the last 10 years or so with the improvements in low light capabilities I was able to get away with current 100-400 and now the 200-600 lenses in many conditions. Recently I moved to the west coast of Canada into an area where nature photography often takes me into deep woods or leads me down narrow river basins in search of bears and other fun stuff. The light in these areas is challenging at best and the sun disappears behind mountains to an extent that I'm finding that to get a reasonable shutter speed for the action I'm shooting at 10000 ISO or greater at F/5.6 or 6.3 depending on the lens I have. I have also found in these situations that I don't as often need >400mm and am often less than 300mm for most shots. This is a range where having a large aperture telephoto zoom would really come in handy again.
Some very low light as the sun was dropping low in the sky on a cold winter day. This shot has been brightened considerably but I was able to get the shot at 1/2000 second and still have a usable ISO.
Now Canon has recently come out with a 100-300 which looks to be a spectacular lens but they have also typically priced it out of reach for most of us who aren't as daffy duck would say "I'm rich,I'm wealthy, I'm comfortably well off". Nikon has also a 120-300 f/2.8 but for their older mount which you can pick up a bit cheaper than the Canon but they don't have one for the Z mount. So this brings me to my opening statement....Sigma could you make a new 120-300 f/2.8 lens? I'm certain that you can make it much lighter than the original, and hopefully still make it for a "reasonable" price. With the improvements in Sigma lenses over the last few years I could see this being an amazing lens. I did recently purchase the Sigma 500 f/5.6 which is a fantastic lens for the E mount (although I would really love to be able to use it with teleconverters....not Sigma's fault it would seem). This light super telephoto lens gives me hope that they could produce the lens I want and likely make it significantly lighter than their original and with the new autofocus and even just the same optical capabilities it would quickly become my goto lens again.
Some of my favourite images were taken with the Sigma 120-300 and even though this was a heavy lens it was still very useful for action shots. Not bad tracking for a bird coming straight towards me with that Canon 1D IV and a third party lens.
Now for the dreamer - to make this lens perfect for my use it would either need to be usable with the teleconverters or even better come with a built in 1.4 or 2 times teleconverter. That would likely boost the cost a bit but I have a feeling that lens would rarely come off my camera at that point.
So Sigma, if you happen to read this, get in touch if you need someone to help you test out this lens in the field :)