A MiceChatter posted pictures recently that motivated me to buy yet another lens for my increasingly creaky Rebel XT digital camera. Specifically, these were photos created using a “fish-eye” lens that can be considered so ultra wide-angle, it captures essentially 180 degrees of vision and ends up distorting the image into a circle.
Mission:Space is already curved.
I’d never had a fisheye lens before, but was intrigued. There was an immediate problem, though. A real fisheye lens costs some $600 or more – that’s a heck of an investment for someone mildly interested.
The castle, as seen from the rear with fisheye.
Just a little bit of clicking and online searching led me to the “fake” fisheye lenses. What you do is buy one of these smaller (and cheaper!) lenses and attach it to one of your *existing* lenses still screwed into the camera. Think of it as a lens add-on. It makes your regular lens into a quasi-fisheye lens. Assuming it’s got a wide enough angle, that is.
A normal lens can’t capture the entire bedroom of the Swiss Family
Treehouse, since it’s too close and too cramped.
I first tried to attach it to my low-light lens (f-stop of 1.4). It screwed on, all right, and certainly changed the image around. Normally, my low-light lens is kind of “zoomed in” since it’s a prime lens and doesn’t zoom in or out, so having this new lens addition will make it possible to shoot in low light but still capture a full frame.
But it didn’t create the classic “sphere” shape of a fisheye, so I had to revert back to the kit lens that came with the camera, which had been languishing on a shelf for a few years. It took me a few minutes to find it, and darned if I didn’t have to dust it off first!
Colonial flags, liberty bell, liberty tree, and Hall of Presidents all in one shot.
The kit lens did the trick. When fully zoomed to wide-angle (in this case, 18 mm), the lens plus my new add on generated a fun little sphere of a picture.
Here’s a shot you can’t get even with a wide-angle lens.
I don’t know about you, but I get a little bit giddy, and probably more than a little obsessive-compulsive (even deranged?), when I go back to the parks after obtaining a new lens. I feel like I have to photograph everything brand new again, as if for the first time!
I only had a couple of hours in Epcot, and a longer day in the Magic Kingdom, but it was definitely rewarding to take the new lens out for a spin. I felt immediately like this was the right purchase for me. Rather than shell out $600 for a fisheye, I had spent a mere $50 for my lens addition. For the record, mine is the Opteka HD .20X Professional Super AF Fisheye, supposedly designed just for the Rebel XT, and Amazon claimed the normal price was $200.
Spaceship Earth from directly underneath.
Flipping through my pictures now a day later, I’m realizing there’s a knack to making good photos using a fisheye, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have it yet. For one thing, it doesn’t look even passably good to simply take photos of the same things, and standing in the same spots, as you would do with a regular lens. The reason, I think, is the distortion and the distance. The subject of the photo is too far away most of the time, so it shrinks on the image.
A conventional shot loses some luster when put into fisheye.
To counterbalance this, you have to get right up into the nostrils of your subject. Really, it’s impossibly close. You think to yourself there’s no way the lens can see everything since you’re so close, but the reality is, it all still comes through.
Straight lines along the outside appear curved.
The upshot is the only close-ups look good in fish-eye. That, or things normally too massive to fit into the frame usually. And since you can’t get close-ups all the time (Country Bear Jamboree, Space Mountain exterior, etc), there are fewer things to take photos of.
The castle looks odd if you stand right below it, but moving away,
you can get find interesting fisheye angles.
That’s all right, though. The uniqueness of the lens might make up for that. It occurs to me that you don’t see a lot of photos of Walt Disney World in fisheye. My speculation would be two-fold. First, I’m betting not a lot of folks own such a lens, even the cheaper “fake” kind like mine.
Second, I’m guessing it’s pretty uncommon to bring a lens like this to your theme park destination if you’re on vacation. You don’t want “artsy” for your vacation pics, you want reality and representativeness, and maybe just a little bit of idealism.
A typical tourist shot, this time with fisheye distortion.
I’m aware that at the end of the day, the fisheye lens is really just a gimmick. That makes me happy I didn’t pay more for such a lens. But I do think I’ll continue to explore and experiment, and while I won’t subject you to another article-length photo spread of just fisheye images, I may slip one in every week if there’s an interesting shot.
I’ve tried to take a photo of the livery in Fort Langhorn before, but even
my standard wide angle lens can’t get it all. The fisheye, however, can!
After all, what good is this Disney fascination we all share if we can’t revel in it every so often? Because, at the end of the day, Disney theme parks are still unbelievably photogenic.
The whole carousel in one shot.
Project Future Photo Contest
Thanks all for your entries to the Project Future Photo Contest. I’m still sifting through them and will run some selected entries next week, plus select a winner.
|
