Do I want a fisheye?

Thrash

Thrash

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Ollie
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Hi guys,

I have an opportunity to buy a Samyang fisheye at a decent price and im very tempted; ive always wanted a fisheye because they intrigue me, I just dont want to spend a couple of hundred of pound on one just to use every so often and it spend most of the time out of my bag. I understand they might simply not work in a lot of situations but I think im intrigued by them simply because theyre different and I might have a bit of fun using one for a few days.

What are peoples thoughts? Ive seen people use them really well and youd only really be able to achieve certain shots using one, im just not sure how often id be taking those kind of shots. Do people just use it like a normal lens and it makes normal photos look better (or even worse) just because its a fisheye?

Im just looking for general opinions from people who own one or who have owned one! :)
 
Buy it, Try it, if you dont get on with it, stick it on the bay.
I bought a Panomar 12 back in the mid 90's, on an Olympus Mount for my OM's.
It has become my 'favorite' lens, despite being fixed focus, having only three apertures, the fastest f-8, and not the most wonderful optical device ever made.
You just have to play with one; be silly, get creative, see what you come up with. You can always make an undestorted 'normal' image from it cropping the middle out.
As you get to see what they do, you can work out better where and when you can exploit one... might not be very often, but you can get some very dramatic or humorous pics with one, and if you get the Samyang for a decent enough price, after playing with it, chances are you'll not get rid, but, justify the bargain some-how!
 
I had a fisheye a while back. Was in the same situation as yourself - had this bug that I wanted one:)
So I bought one and loved it. I didn't use it much and ended up selling it but now wish I'd kept it.

I think with fisheye's that once you have this hankering to get one, you will never be happy till you've done it. You may regret it and hardly use it but at least the bug will be gone:)
 
I have the Samyang 8mm and it's epic.....so sharp you'll cut yourself :) but it's very specialist...if the price is as good as you say though if you have it and don't like it...it sounds like you'll get your money back as like most lens there used price is quite stable :D
 
The very fact that you are asking the forum implies that you aren't so sure? I too would love a fisheye but in all honesty, I think it would be rarely used to warrant a purchase. I would say buying something based on novelty doesn't hold true interest for long. As mentioned though, you could buy, play then ebay it. Personally I'd give it a miss and concentrate on what you have already, unless of course you plan a serious project around the use of it.
 
Thanks for the replies guys, I am interested but as everyone knows theyre fairly expensive lenses and I dont have an intended use for it; just to mess around with!
Im just wondering if I would be better investing the money elsewhere on a lens which is good and I know I will use, I just dont know what! :lol:
 
Thrash said:
Thanks for the replies guys, I am interested but as everyone knows theyre fairly expensive lenses and I dont have an intended use for it; just to mess around with!
Im just wondering if I would be better investing the money elsewhere on a lens which is good and I know I will use, I just dont know what! :lol:
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What lenses do you already have?
If you have everything you need covered, then lens makers will always be tantalising you with something you might make use of... and a fish is just one of them.
If the price is good, give it a shot. As said, if you find something you think you want more, stick it on e-bay... till then give it a go and have a bit of fun with it!
 
Ive just got a 17-50mm f2.8 which will be arriving tomorrow after switching back to a Canon DSLR from an X100. I was mulling over the 50mm f1.8, 50mm f1.4 or the 40mm f2.8 but im going to have all those ranges covered with the 17-50 so depending on how it performs will determine what I go for, if any.
Theyre really all the focal lengths I use, dont really have any use for a bigger focal length, when I had one before I rarely used it
 
A fish eye is a really specialist lens and truth be told 99.5% of my photography doesn't need it :thumbs: but there are those shots that it just works for :D and for that reason I'll never get rid...I'm even tempted by the canon 15mm specifically for my 5D3 :D
 
As far as I see it, the only solution for you is to rent one...?



Or borrow one... isn't there a "tp borrow a lens here"-thread somewhere?
 
I have, use and love an 8mm Sigma fisheye. IIRC, it's the only one that gives a full 180 degree circular image and has AF (not that AF is a necessity - DoF is massive at f/5.6 and smaller!) Some lenses' effects can be replicated fairly easily in PP but a fisheye is the only thing that can deliver the goods convincingly.

They're not cheap but I was lucky enough to pick mine up as an unused 2nd hand one for a real bargain price. It's not for sale, although if you're local to Exeter, you can have a play to get an idea of the effects you can achieve with it. Thinking about it, there might be a fisheye available that gives the same features on crop bodies - maybe a 4.5mm, again from Sigma.
 
Nod said:
I have, use and love an 8mm Sigma fisheye. IIRC, it's the only one that gives a full 180 degree circular image and has AF (not that AF is a necessity - DoF is massive at f/5.6 and smaller!) Some lenses' effects can be replicated fairly easily in PP but a fisheye is the only thing that can deliver the goods convincingly. They're not cheap but I was lucky enough to pick mine up as an unused 2nd hand one for a real bargain price. It's not for sale, although if you're local to Exeter, you can have a play to get an idea of the effects you can achieve with it. Thinking about it, there might be a fisheye available that gives the same features on crop bodies - maybe a 4.5mm, again from Sigma.
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Thanks for the offer but unfortunately I'm in the north east so not local at all :) if it's still there I might go for it and if I don't like it just sell it on here or eBay, as said there seems to be a good level of demand for them. If it's no longer there I suppose it wasn't meant to be! :)
 
Nod said:
I have, use and love an 8mm Sigma fisheye. IIRC, it's the only one that gives a full 180 degree circular image and has AF (not that AF is a necessity - DoF is massive at f/5.6 and smaller!) Some lenses' effects can be replicated fairly easily in PP but a fisheye is the only thing that can deliver the goods convincingly.
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That may be true for Nikon, but the Canon 8-15 fits the bill. :)
Here's an example...
i-kC4FDQb-M.jpg


Regards the OP question...
I've had more fun with this lens than any lens I've owned.
Conventional subjects don't seem to work and yet the most mundane subjects go pop.
I bought the lens for star-scapes, but have yet to take one.
It's been been in my bag most of the year and has been used at festivals and for landscapes with hugely satisfying results.

If you have the itch, then go for it!
As already commented, if you buy second-hand you may not lose anything by selling it on.
 
My 8mm Samyang is the main reason I kept hold of my 60D after I got a 5D3.

Fantastic little lens, very sharp, with careful framing you can minimise the distortion and it defishes easily in PS. if you've got the chance of a cheap one I'd snap it up.
 
Duncan, that and an MPE-65 could end up seeing me with a 5D yet! Then again, the Sigma fish and Nikkor 105VR are more than enough for me (and my talent!!!)
 
I have the Canon 15mm, use it for events, generally towards the end of the night for the dancefloor (alongside a normal lens). They're good fun, and obviously get you images that are unique to the lens. I like it because it's easy to stick up in the air and get an overall shot of the room - being 6'5" probably helps there too. It also wraps in all the lighting from the room, so if you shoot fairly close to people dancing, you can still see all of the lasers, confetti, etc behind them, great for atmosphere.

I also use it for startrails / night sky shots on the odd occasion I do them, purely because I'm lazy and it gets a lot of sky in the shot. :thumbs:
 
I have the Nikon 10.5dx. It rarely gets used. But I never leave without having it in the bag because every now and then a shot screams out for something a bit different.
 
markmullen said:
I had a Canon 8-15 to play with for a while but to be absolutely honest the novelty wore off after about half an hour.

That said it just didn't fit my style, if I was into skateboard photography, or caving, or whatever it might be just the job.
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I've used mine for landscapes.
As long as you are prepared to experiment it's OK; but traditional compositions just don't work.

One thing it is good at is pulling subjects out of a cluttered environment.
The near stuff does not get lost in the image.
It's a good alternative to using shallow DoF to throw the background out of focus to keep attention on the main subject.
20130712-220520-IMG_9871-S.jpg


Sometimes it just makes a refreshingly different image.
As an example, here's the Mendip Toast Rack; it's in a sanitised quarry and is too big/solid to be removed.
Anything taken of this at 50mm looks pretty boring once you get past the initial puzzle over what it is.
This first shot is the best I could do at 135mm; I've tried to reduce the subject to an abstract set of shapes and lines.
20130223-121029-I39A7235-S.jpg

Here's the same subject at 15mm; I prefer this version as it has far more visual impact.
20130223-105428-I39A7138-S.jpg
 
Maybe worth a reminder, that sub 16mm 'wide-angle' is not always a 'fish'.
The Sigma 8-16 for Crop-Sensor cameras for instance; covers the typical range most fishes fall into, but its NOT a fish-eye zoom; its a rectilinear corrected wide angle, though does give some 'fishy' bowing towards the edge of frame.
The true 'fish' gives a true 'angular' perspective, rather than a true depth perspective.
Eg: of you set the camera on a tripod; take a tape measure measure out say, 25ft straight ahead from the film-plane, then focus the lens at that distance...
Rectaliniar Wide-Angle, should, give focus on a PLANE perpendicular to your focus distance. Ie anything on the line at right angles to your 25m mark, ought to be in focus, even though, at the edge of the frame, the distance along the hypotenuse from subject to camera is probably a lot more than the focus dustance.
Fish-Eye, should give focus on a CURVE constant distance from the camera. So, if you move anything accross the frame, you also have to move it closer to keep it in focus as its focus distance is the hypotenuse, regardless.
It is actually the more 'natural' way for a lens to work, and what we see as bending is actually not an error but a lack of correction, the lens trying to flatten that portion of a ball flat, like large scale map of the world, stretching the Arctic and Antarctic.
On a long lens the curve is so small, that its negligible or needs very little flattening; but when you get to wide angles it does, hence we see the difference.

Full-fish, gives a full 180 field of view in both axis, and creates a circular image.
I think that on a 35mm of full frame camera, this occurs at about 7-8mm focal length. Though 12mm fishes with a 180 FoV only on the diagonal, (like mine) were popular as they gave the fish-effect towards the edges, without shrinking the subject in the centre to drastically; or producing to heavily masked a picture. 15mm Fish-Eyes, didn't give a full 180 FoV, but provided full-frame coverage, cropping the most fishy bits fro the edges.

On modern crop sensor cameras, only the Sigma 4.5mm AFAIK gives full circle all axis 180 fish coverage. The 8mm lenses, like the full frame 12mm's give a 'cropped' diagonal 180. The 10mm's give full frame coverage with edge fish distortion.

Really depends what you want to achieve with a fish, and how fishy you want the image to be, as far as that extreme edge run-away perspective. The effect fades as subject distances get further from camera; so you do have to be right up close and often on near focus limit to get the exagerated perspective a fish can give and make it discernably fishy. Great for people and party shots or skate-board kind of stuff. Internal architecture, small spaces, of big things? The true angular perspective can make converging verticals and the like 'bow', rather than converge, and make them look less 'wrong' or building falling down.

You REALLY have to have a feel for a fish to exploit one; hence lots of playing to get it. Twenty years and I'm still playing! But getting there, and lots of fun in the process.
 
I sold my 10.5mm, probably to fund something else at the time, but it's a lens i still hanker after because of its versatility and the way it can add a very different dimension to a situation.

Of course, like it's already been mentioned, there is a massive novelty factor and for some people, that novelty is short-lived. For others it can last longer and as i found, getting used to the lens and really assessing when and where it should be used meant it stayed in my bag much longer than it would have with other people...

If the price is good then get it - is that money going to be needed for something else or can you afford to have a lens that might not see that much use in your bag? If it's the latter, get to know the lens - get to know what is can do in terms of focus distances, distortion, CAs etc... I found that by knowing all this I was always prepared for what it threw at me and I could concern myself with getting new and interesting shots. There's nothing worse than over-using a lens and then focussing on faults and nuances (and blaming them) when a shot isn't possibly as good as you'd expected.
 
Further thunk I had after, and following specialman's comments about blaming the lens.
METERING... fishes cover SUCH a huge field of view, that even a 5% spot metering covers more 'landscape' than the center-weight area you#d have with a lens closer to standard.
In addition, with the lens packing in so much scenary, its likely to be grabbing a LOT of big areas of bright and dark. I don't know how smart modern matrix metering systems have got, or whether on Digital cameras that talk to the lens, whether a fish might tell any to use an alternative program... BUT.... starting point for better results with a fish is old fasioned F-16-Sunny, DONT rely on TTL-Metering. Assess the scene, look everywhere in your frame; ponder how much bright sky you are getting in the top, and how much dark shaddow round your feet, lens will pack all in!
Meter with a lens closer to standard to get some ball-park EV settings, and or use a hand-held for some incident readings; to get some idea what sort of exposure values the scene you are looking at REALLY needs; DON'T believe TTL readings!
Bit of old-school discipline; assessing the scene; but key to good results with a fish.
292587_607783449246576_1403870583_n.jpg

I love Bouncy-Castles... and they just SO loved a fish-eye... I actually got banned from hiring them when I had kids... "WE dont want any more round bludy photo's on another chuffing Bouncy Castle!":shrug: But they bend and bow, like the photo! However....
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This kind of thing, to make use of the exagerated perspective, is very tempting, BUT, illustrated the sort of scenario; on 'auto' camera would have metered on some sort of CWA sceme, presuming thats where the subject of interest is... not at the edges, where its rather dimmer and my subjects of interest actually ARE, not in the middle thats just rather bright summer sky.
1379573_666596236698630_1029880901_n.jpg

Same trick at the Wallace Monument, tought me to MAKE SURE the camera is on Manual, & to meter on subject before composing & exposing... this one exposed for the sky... and subjects merged into shaddow... though this isn't the completely hoolied one.
But some suggestion to where you have to get to know the lens, and how it works with your camera, as well as where and when you can use it to effect for more interesting shots.
 
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