The Real Fisheye Lens

Fisheye lens is pretty much like salt and pepper you'll find on the restaurant table. You can enjoy your dish as prepared or you can add some salt and pepper just to get that extra taste to your dish. It is all up to your own taste.

The same goes to fisheye lens. A fisheye lens is considered to be one of the specialty lens and could cost you from RM1000 to RM4500 (about $300-$1500) or perhaps even more. That distortion (extreme curve near the edges of the picture) is the main characteristic of a picture taken with fisheye lens. Some people like it but some find it weird and not up to their liking. However, if used correctly, a fisheye lens can always be a very creative tool of art.

Here are some real life examples of my works with fisheye lens:

1. Landscape. Fisheye lens is a powerful tool to capture the landscape in a way that your eyes can never see it (assuming that your field of vision is normal).

 A shot taken early in the morning in Lumut, Perak, Malaysia. No transformation were done on the picture. The distortion is what I exactly saw on my LCD right after I took this picture.

 Chonggyecheon (청계천) stream, Seoul, South Korea during the midday sun. Some transformations and croppings were done in Photoshop to tone down the fisheye effect a little bit but you can still see it there. I also played around with the shadows and contrast.

 Hadley Village, University at Buffalo NY. Light transformations and color retouching were done on the picture in Photoshop.

2. People. Unless you place your subject at the center of the frame, it's going to have that weird look where half of their face seems longer than the other half. The more you place your subject near to the edges of the frame, the distortion becomes stronger. You can always fix it in Photoshop but it's time consuming to do it for every picture and not that practical especially if you're a pro and have limited amount of time.

 Aizat stood proud next to the UB Buffalo statue. No transformations were done. 

 Another transform-free image of Rachel at Colonie Apartments.

At Izzati and Aizam's reception. Picture was transformed and cropped in Photoshop .

I never thought having a fisheye can be as useful as it was on that day. For the whole ceremony I had to get pictures of everyone sitting around the bride and bridegroom and my biggest challenge was (in case I didn't have a fisheye lens), there was a pole less than two meters away from where everyone was sitting. However, my 8mm fisheye lens was the star of the show! I was able to stand in front of the pole and still get everyone in the picture.

Here's an example of how I use my fisheye lens to capture the bigger picture of a special day.

Now it's time for some pictures of the superb Rokinon (or Samyang as you'll find it here) 8mm fisheye lens: 

 The aperture blades which control how much light gets into your camera. 

 Aspherical lens. Basically it's a lens designed with a special element to produce higher-quality images.

Another special characteristic of this lens is the bulging front element seen above.

Aperture and a huge focus ring. This is a manual lens so setting aperture and focus are all done by you, not your camera. Well not bad since it doesn't cost me an arm and a leg.

Well in case you're wondering, all the pictures of the lens above were taken with my 50mm 1.8 lens with Canon extension tube EF12 II attached. I'm getting a 85mm 1.8 lens from Canon pretty soon (and I'll be posting pictures taken with the lens too here!) but this fisheye lens will always be among my favorites!