Haven’t posted for a couple of weeks, but that’s going to change over the next few weeks as I schedule some posts from Cornwall and other photoshoots I’ve done recently. But first … I’ve toyed with getting a fisheye lens for quite a long time, but the cost of the native lenses for the Sony cameras has never seemed to justify the expenditure on what is quite a quirky and occasional use lens.
Then I came across this lens from Meike for the Sony E mount cameras. It takes images using the APS-C format, so it’s important to set a Full-frame camera to APSC-C before using it, and also you need to set the camera to release the shutter without a lens, because the camera doesn’t recognise the lens. Apart from that it’s very easy to use, in any mode but I have used Manual mode with manual focus so far. You set the focussing distance and the aperture setting on the lens itself and away you go. With the f-stop going down as low as 2, you can be reasonably sure of a reasonable shot especially if you’ve set your ISO to Auto.
You can get it from Amazon currently for £119.99 and I have to say the build quality appears very good; it’s not a plastic lens! It’s also available for Nikon and Canon mounts, and several others.
There are proper reviews of it here, on ephotozine, and shutterbug – have a look at these if you’re in any way interested! If you want to read an article with tips on how to take photographs with a fisheye lens (this one in fact), you could look at this article on shutterbug.
And so to my first attempts. I took the lens to Llandaff Cathedral and in addition to the one that appears above, I also took this image …
… which I then cropped to see what it looked like in a traditional 1 x 1 square format …
… still an interesting photograph, but I think the “fisheye image” look works best.
This is shown off best in the image of the Epstein “Christ in Majesty” which appears as the featured image and which I repeat below.
[EXIF 1/60sec, f8, ISO 10000]