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Fish Eye Lenses

Let's have a little fun. You guys ready for a little break here? So we'll have some fun. Let's talk about the fish eye lens. This is something that had interested me very early on in photography, and through most of my photographic career I have owned a fish eye lens. I don't use it that much, but it's just one of those nice little secret weapon tools that you can pull out of the bag and really change the situation. So if you were to photograph a grid pattern with a normal lens, you should get straight lines up, down, and everywhere in the frame. When you use a fish eye lens, this is what happens when you photograph a grid pattern. Things kinda bend around the middle of the frame and it's trying to reach into the corners as far as possible. And so when we talk about a fish eye lens, there's a number of different types of fish eyes and we're gonna talk about a couple of them. But most lenses that are out there are what are known as rectilinear lens where straight lines will be rendered ...

straight whereas, in the fish eye, it's an uncorrected lens trying to grab as wide an angle of view as possible. So, with a moderately wide lens, a 35 wide lens 63 degrees. Now we're actually measuring corner to corner. So, this is a little different than we were doing in the previous section. Let's go to a slightly wider angle lens, 17, so we're in the ultra wide category. We've gone 93 degrees from corner to corner. The straight lines in the building are still straight, but when we switch over to a fish eye lens, we're now starting to get bending in a lot of those straight lines and we are reaching 180 degrees from corner to corner. And so this very much mimics the angle of view that you see when you are using both eyes in their entirety all the way to the sides. There is a special type of fish eye lens called a circular fisheye lens which results in 180 degrees in all directions and you end up with a circular image. These images are very difficult to work with because we don't usually work with circular images. We have squares and rectangles that we work with, but circular images are a little bit harder to frame and put out there. So you end up with these black corners, but that's what a circular fisheye will look like. And so we have circular fisheyes, we have what are called full frame fisheyes and our ultra wides. Here's where things can get a little confusing because when I say this is a full frame fisheye, that has nothing to do with full frame cameras. You can have a full frame fisheye on a crop frame camera. This term full frame fisheye came about long before digital and crop sensors and all of that. This basically meant the entire frame had image on it whereas the circular, you ended up with a circular image. Alright, so let's take a look at some of these fisheye examples. So, Nikon has a 16 which is for their full frame system. They have a 10.5, let me try to say this very clearly, it is a full frame fisheye for the crop frame. (laughs) Make sure I get that right. And so Canon went a different route. They have an 8-15 zooming fisheye so that you can use it on their full frame cameras or their crop frame and get a full frame fisheye effect. If you have the full frame camera, if you set it to eight, you will get a circular fisheye. So it's a little bit more versatile, but it's a little bit bigger, it's a little bit slower 'cause it's an f/4 not an f/2.8 lens. But those are two of the more popular options out there. Nikon's had an eight millimeter lens, this was back in about the 70's or so, and the front element of that was used for the HAL 9, in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. And so, neat little history there. And then another cool Nikon lens from their past was their six millimeter lens which can see behind itself. It has 220 degrees that it can see, and part of the reason that this was developed was for industrial investigation. Often times they would put this on a device that would go into a, like a pipe, like the Alaska Pipeline so that they wanted to like, see where there were cracks and so forth. And so it's extremely rare. Every once in awhile you'll see one of these pop up on eBay for about $100,000. Wow. With other systems whether it's the Micro 4/3 or other mount systems there are gonna be fisheyes most likely available from it. It's kinda one of those 20th lenses that they make. You know, once they get all the main lenses out, then you're gonna start having some fun with the fisheyes. And so there's a number of amount they're available. So once again, let's just take a look at a series of zooms. This is at 50 millimeters, and we'll kinda zoom back from and 28 going through all our different focal lengths. This is Horseshoe Bend in Arizona near Page, Arizona. Go back to 14 all the way to 11 millimeters. And then we go back to fisheye and you'll notice that horizon is starting to bend here. And so we can take a look at where the crops are for the other frames in here and these are bending because it's the fisheye is what's bending everything around and so it's the bendy wide angle. There's a lot of different ways to use a fisheye and this is a good example of a bad way to use a fisheye. This is not a good reason and if you get a fisheye, what happens is you start shooting everything with a fisheye and you over shoot like any new item you have you overuse it and then you start realizing okay it's gonna work better in some situations than others. You know, it's kinda novel getting this really bendy effect in there, but it does get a little tiresome fairly quickly. And so you wanna figure out other places to use it. And so in this case, you know, it's a really tight little arena, and a night, well it's not a night club, it's a record store but they're having a little concert here and I wanted to show, you know, as much of that environment as possible and nothing sees wider than a fisheye lens. So I can show the band and the people in a very, very tight range. It is often known as the skateboard lens because you get up real close to your subjects and you make 'em look all goofy and then you, with a motor drive and so forth. And so it can be fun when you get really close to subjects. Now the thing that's unusual about the fisheye and what is kinda hard to believe is this is a fisheye shot. But it doesn't have the bendy lines, right? It doesn't have the bendy lines because all the lines that are in this photograph run through the center of the frame. If lines run through the center, they're gonna be straight. So this is actually a video and notice the line how it gets bent down here. And watch what happens when I tip the camera. Then we get the bendy lines and so any line that goes around the middle of the frame will bend, but everything through the middle is perfectly straight. Cool. I realized this shot is one that I took 25 years ago. It feels a very long time ago. And so I mounted the camera on the handlebars of my bike and this was long before GoPro's were ever came around. And so GoPro cameras all have a little bit of a semi fisheye look to them. And so I like using fisheyes in areas where you would never realize that they were fisheyes. And so in an area like this, there are no straight lines. And so when I show this photo, people aren't gonna go, "Oh, that's a fisheye lens." And so that's where I think they are most effective is when you can't really tell that it's a fisheye lens. I often find myself using it in big round environments. And so this is kind of a hollowed out cave, it's a little Kiva in Canyonlands, and you wouldn't know this because I put the horizon line through the middle. The aquarium here in Seattle has a domed area and that's a perfect place for using a fisheye. It's kind of the natural environment for a fisheye. You wouldn't know this was a fisheye because you're expecting these to be curved at the edges and the fisheye is bending them in a way, but in a way that you can't really see the results and the telltale sign of it. It's a fisheye, it's not quite as apparent here. You can look at the stems off to the side to kinda get a feel of it, but it gets you that kind of small, bug eyes view that you can get real close in on a subject. Sometimes I don't mind the bendy lines like the horizon here I just wanted to get the camera in an unusual position so I had the camera on a monopode about six, eight feet up in the air. So I wanted to show kinda the entire environment for this particular event. And so once again, a round environment. Nice place for using a fisheye. And then this is where I went right below the chandelier and I shot up using a circular fisheye and the circular fisheye, to be honest with you, I've really only used it a couple of times. I borrowed it, rented it out for the day and ran around Seattle trying to find as many places to shoot with a circular fisheye as I could find. And so straight lines through the middle of the circular fisheye will also be rendered straight. So anything going through the middle will be straight, but everything else is kind of bent around the edges. And so this is a circular fisheye and the blue area indicates the full frame of my camera. If it was a full frame fisheye, it would just be capturing this area in the middle. And so you can look 180 degrees up and down and to the left and right and I found that with circular fisheyes I really like shooting staircases. Staircases with bends in them, unusual shapes to 'em, and so these are very, very difficult. My favorite area to shoot was at one of the universities here in Seattle that has a double spiral staircase and a round set of lights above it and you can go down to the very bottom of the staircase, shoot straight up and you get this really nice spiral pattern. And so if you know of a good double spiral staircase or a spiral staircase, this would be a great place for using this. And so if you are using one of these types of lenses, whether it's the circular or the full frame fisheye, really be thinking about looking for those curved lines 'cause those are ones that are probably gonna look pretty well and you gotta really be careful of those straight lines. The straight ones through the middle are kept straight, everything else is bent. And you do have to be a little bit careful with the front of the lens 'cause it exposed, it's out in front and I think for the best effect if people don't know you used a fisheye, you probably did a really good job using it.