My father and my grandfather were outright camera maniacs, and around the time I joined middle school, I began shooting photographs myself. I got to try out many different types of film cameras, from single-lens and twin-lens mirror-reflex cameras to Polaroids and medium format cameras, before starting to shoot digital in 2000. I bought myself a SIGMA lens on my father’s recommendation. When I attached it to my precious Canon EOS 10D, I was surprised by the lens’ sharpness – like the blade of a knife – and the elegant, subtle beauty of its color tones. With the SIGMA lens I was choosing to shoot a little underexposed, bringing up the brightness in the development stage, and even the resulting image noise worked well with my preferences.

The lenses I use these days are the SIGMA 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC (over ten years already) for snapshots and the SIGMA MACRO 50mm F2.8 EX DG (five years now) for macro photography.
I use SIGMA lenses not when I want to capture the reality as-is, but when I want to shoot with a little sinister touch of my own. The way SIGMA’s products render an image, it’s like there’s a mysterious magic hidden somewhere in the realm of underexposure. I simply borrow some of that magic and capture the world, a little darker than it really is. Then, when the images are fully developed, they carry an inexplicable humor within them.

SIGMA’s brand to me means “deconstruction and creation”. Whether it is their Foveon sensor or the shape of their cameras, there’s a sense that they dare to rethink generally accepted ideas of what a camera is at a fundamental level.
The history of the camera only extends about 200 years into the past, and digital cameras have barely been around for 50 years. I hope SIGMA continue to create cameras, lenses and sensors that challenge the capabilities of photographic expression.