Fisheye Lens Photography

Recently I've had the pleasure of dropping some cash on a new fisheye lens for my digital SLR camera.  Those of you into photography know what fun they can be and might even understand what a nice tool it is especially when shooting large venues outside. I picked up the Bower 8mm fisheye lens from Amazon for $272.

I thought I would take a moment and show off what the lens can do.  To make that happen I took a few photos so we could compare a few key differences between a fisheye lens and other common lenses.

(Once you click a photo you can see it large and play through all of the photos on this page.)

The first shot is some gear sitting on my desk shot from a 50mm prime lens. The lens on the left is my new wide angle 8mm fisheye lens while the lens on the right is the 18-55mm zoom that came with the camera.

This is the same shot, same shot tripod setup, with the 18mm-55mm zoom pulled back to around 24mm. Notice that the lens on the right is now the 50mm prime lens and the fisheye lens looks smaller in the view (we are not as close as the 50mm brings us to the gear).

And this is, again, the exact same tripod shot but I am now shooting with the 8mm fisheye lens.  I can tell you that is far more difficult to bring the subject matter into focus with such a big shot. Another interesting fact about this Bower lens is that it can shoot a full 180 degrees capturing litterally everything in front of the camera.  But equally as cool, on my cropped sensor Canon t2i DSLR, the lens is considered horizontally aspherical, meaning your lens completely fills the frame without requiring you to crop your circular shot later on.  Typically, fisheye lens shoot a picture which looks a bit like you are glancing through a pinhole or keyhole, with the edges blurring away into darkness. This lens completely fills the view.  Very cool!

Finally, here are a few additional shots I took over the weekend with the new fisheye lens.

I am going to do some video work this week for Princeton University "inside drive" campus beauty video driving a golf cart where only students can typically walk.  Part of the fun on this shoot will be getting students to wave at the camera and so someone found this old megaphone, but as soon as we turned it on, a capacitor blew!  Black smoke rolled out of it and it ceased to work.  So I took it apart and found which parted needed replacing.  after calling and visiting a number of Radio Shacks in the area I was ready to give up.  Then, on the way home from church I remembered another Radio Shack which had the part! About an hour later it was working ... smoke free!

On Saturday morning I got up early to pull off some errands: the post office, the DMV (to register to vote!) and I wanted to catch an early matinee for a movie I was hoping to see.  It is a Christian movie and they don't make many of those (nor do they get a lot of play in big theaters) so I drove to a newish theater in Hamilton New Jersey to catch the movie. The movie was "Courageous" and it had some pretty good acting, a few touching moments and funny bits.  I am certain it was enjoyable to make. The really fun bit of this theater moment for me was when I arrived at the venue.  It was only about 20+ minutes from my office and I wasn't expecting it to be as big as it was.  24 screens! The biggest surprise is that this Hamilton, NJ AMC 24 Theater is a carbon copy of my favorite 30 screen AMC movie theater in Mesquite Texas (only a little smaller in New Jersey ... everything is bigger in Texas!).  In fact, many years ago I remember seeing (and falling in love with) the movie Garden State at that AMC theater in Mesquite.  So it is a bit ironic to be standing in a copy of that favorite theater actually living in the Garden State itself (I don't know that I would have guessed such a thing would have happened).

Saturday evening was filled with home made chicken wings for dinner and a bit of Akira Kurosawa film watching, which was just what the doctor ordered.  An enjoyable end to a fun day.