Need advice for Wide angle Fisheye lens

K

Khazaad

Member
I have a Canon 7D and want to buy a wide angle fisheye lens to take some cloud time-lapse shots with the fisheye effect, what kind of lens do you suggest, and should I be careful with Canon's 1.6x crop factor?

Not really looking for a fish eye stand alone lens as I don't think I can afford it.

If I am to buy a fisheye/macro lens that screws onto my pre-existing lens, any general advice about that? I have a wide angle zoom lens 15-85 lens (72mm thread), a 50mm prime and 55-250mm lens (both 58mm thread). Should I try to buy a wide angle screw on for the 72mm to get the most out of the wide angle, or would one with 58mm thread be alright if I screw it on the Canon 50mm f1.4 prime lens?

Any help would be appreciated.
 
Any convertor lenses which screw onto your front threads will degrade the image significantly. While this will probably be just noticable in video mode, if you are shooting stills you will notice a significant decrease in sharpness and a lot more chromatic abberations.

My advice would be to get something like the Canon 10-22mm or Tokina 11-16. These lenses are not full fisheye lenses but they will give you a very wide view (definitely wide enough for landscapes) without bending your horizons or distorting the image too much. If you can't afford to buy either of these lenses then consider renting them for a few daysm - you'll spend less than you will if you just buy junk screw-on glass, and you'll be much happier with the results.
 
Last edited:
without even getting into the "sharpness doesn't matter for video" argument, which I totally disgree with, I'll share the following:

some time ago I bought something on ebay, don't even remember what it was, and the seller sent me one of those screw-in-front-of-your-lens adaptors by mistake

it was the most awful piece of s**t you can put in front of your lens; think absolute blurryness and 50-pixels-wide ultra-evident chromatic aberration in pictures taken inside the house, don't even think about taking it outside

only suitable for "special effects", as in "for some strange reason, now I want a very wide but totally blurry and aberrating shot"; I've seen a couple of those in music videos, and it can look artistically nice, but I've never felt the urge to inflict such suffering to my images myself

(the macro adapter that came with it made for a totally awesome DIY viewfinder loupe, though)

on the other end of the spectrum, the tokina 11-16 is an amazing lens, and really, really wide; but it's not fisheye, it's a rectilinear wide lens (being fisheye is not a factor of how wide the lens is, but of how the lens is designed; I find rectilinear wides much more useful than fisheyes)
 
Khazaad said:
Not really looking for a fish eye stand alone lens as I don't think I can afford it.
Click to expand...

Rent. You can rent quite a lot more lens for a week than you would be able to buy for anywhere near the same amount. Plus, you won't be stuck with a lens that you only need once in a while, if ever again.
 
Those adapters are generally pretty bad, especially in the corners.

I just bought a Samyang 8mm fisheye for my 7D - it was £200 but the quality is very good imo. It's manual aperture/focus though.

Your 15mm is quite wide, but fisheye is a different look - the distortion is a feature where normal wide lenses try to minimise distortion.
 
Khazaad said:
Also considering I already have the Canon 15-85mm and it seems really sharp and excellent on the 15mm end, is there much need to fork out another $800 or more for a few mm wider?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Well that depends... how often do you need to shoot wider that 15mm?

At wide angles, the tiniest difference in focal length can make a huge difference in the FOV. Think about it... at 15mm, and extra 4mm is about 30% wider. Whereas at a longer focal length, say 200mm, 4mm would only be a 2% difference. So 11mm is quite a bit wider than 15mm.

n any case, I would stay away from those cheap adaptors. It is money wasted, in my opinion. Those sorts of cheap converters were barely usable for SD video, let alone HD.
 
on a 1.6x crop sensor, 15mm means 74º horizontal FoV, while 11mm means 91º horizontal FoV

for me, that doesn't sound such a big difference as it feels with the camera in my hands

look for a tokina 11-16 review with pictures from the same spot both at 11mm and at 16mm and judge yourself

and, if you need more reassurance that the tokina 11-16 is an amazing lens, check out this page I found yesterday, where the owner of a rental house recommends the tokina 11-16 among some other (generally much more expensive) lenses:
http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/02/photo-lenses-for-video/5
there's a fisheye on the list too: the sigma 10mm, which costs about the same as the tokina, so once you have the money you just have to choose if you really want fisheye or prefer rectilinear
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top