Here’s a lens I bought a while ago, but never used. It was inexpensive, and I thought I might someday want to play with a fisheye perspective. It has only three focus settings – infinity, distant, and close. As a 9mm lens, it is the equivalent of an 18mm lens on a full-frame camera, so it is very wide angle.
Now, after playing with it for two days (yesterday I used in incorrectly and everything was out of focus), I still don’t see much use for this lens. The fisheye effect has never been one that I have liked, and with this lens, I only got some interesting curvatures when the subject was close to me – within ten feet or less. When the subject was further away, I just got what appears to be just a bit of a bend (actually, the besd parallels the bend in the fence, but it is almost unnoticeable). As you can see in this picture, the fence had some interesting shape, but the bridge in the background hardly looked distorted at all.
Is this because it is such a wide angle lens, which tends to overemphasize the distance to the background? I would be interested in trying some higher end fisheyes to compare results.
There is a bit of a bend to the bridge, but the fence is so pronounced that it’s hard to see. It would be interesting to see a city scape or view down a street.
I think there is some bend in the bridge but it’s overshadowed by the bend in the fence. It’d be nice to see a street scape or such.
Interesting to see the effects both close up and at a distance. It seems to indicate that fish-eyes have two main uses: to produce intriguingly distorted images of objects very close to the lens, and to capture relatively undistorted very wide angle scenics. If I had one (which I don’t) I’d be tempted to keep it just for the former and see what fun effects I could get with things like flowers, coins, car grilles, and so on; wide-angle scenics are probably better captured with multiple images stitched together later in software, though that certainly takes more time.