Fisheye

All posts tagged Fisheye

Here’s My Secret Car Show Photography Weapon – The Fisheye Lens

Posted by scottbourne on October 2, 2011
Posted in: Tips. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved

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Cross Posted at CarLoves.com

You know the problem. The backgrounds often suck. There are always people in the way. It’s tough to find a car in decent light. The angles are all wrong. There’s no room to work.

That sounds like a pretty average car show to me. I feel your pain. But I do have a suggestion. I consider my fisheye lens to be my secret weapon when it comes to photographing car shows.

Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved

The fisheye allows you to work extremely close so this minimizes people getting in your way. It also allows you to work with unusual angles that help accentuate the positives of your backgrounds and to make mundane things look interesting.

You do need to worry about two things: one – make sure your own feet aren’t in the picture. It happens when you work with a fisheye – two – make sure to watch your shadow. You may think it’s out of the way but it often is not.

Working from low angles or right down on top of the subject are my two favorite tricks when using a fisheye lens at a car show.

Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved

The other thing to know is that when you shoot with a fisheye lens at a car show, extreme cropping is your friend. Forget about congenital print sizes. Think outside the box and make compositions in post by cropping in ways that make the picture more desirable.

Another cool thing you can do with fisheye lenses is change angles so that perspective is unusual. This gives a new look to your car photos.

Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved

Here are a couple of additional random tips:

1. Don’t be afraid to put the sun in your frame. It often looks cool in a fisheye shot
2. You can’t typically use polarizers with fisheye lenses which is a negative since they cut reflections on cars, but these lenses are so wide that you still get the blue sky effect
3. Don’t spend too much time worrying about focus. Get as close as your camera will focus and don’t even worry about looking through the viewfinder. The angle of view is so wide that just about everything will be in focus

Copyright Scott Bourne 2011 - All Rights Reserved

The next time you photograph a car show, don’t forget your fisheye.
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Mini Review Nikon 16 mm F/2.8 Fisheye Lens

Posted by scottbourne on May 5, 2009
Posted in: Reviews. Tagged: .
Copyright Scott Bourne 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Copyright Scott Bourne 2009 - All Rights Reserved

I made my first shots with the Nikon 16mm F/2.8 AF-D lens at Yellowstone National Park. I’ve owned several fisheye lenses in the past, including some of the old-fashioned kind that made a circular image.

Hands down, this is one of the best fisheye lenses I’ve ever used.

It’s intended for use on full-frame Nikon cameras like the D3 and D700. It’s very sturdy, small, lightweight and easy to work with and provides a full 180 degree perspective – i.e., watch where you put your feet because they might end up in the shot!

While I didn’t extensively test it, I found the lens to be very sharp across the board with f/5.6 providing spectacular results and F/2.8 sharp everywhere except the extreme corners. After F/8 it starts to get soft too – which is no big deal on a Fisheye lens.

I found no color fringing and frankly amazing fall-off after f/4.

The truly amazing thing about the Nikon 16 fisheye is its ability to shoot minus flare or ghosting. Notice the sun is in the top right corner of my photo and it doesn’t ghost the entire image? No fisheye lens I’ve ever used performs this well.

Nikon includes a small pouch with a warming, cooling and orange filter. These are bayonet mount filters that attach to the back of the lens. There are no threads on the front of the lens that you can use to screw in a filter. The lens ships with a clear filter installed on the back and you need to use that or some other filter to get a shot in focus.

For the money, this lens is a very good value, particularly because of its performance, it’s low weight and its reasonable price to performance ratio. If you’re a full-frame Nikon shooter, this is the fisheye you want.

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Yellowstone Trip Report #2

Posted by scottbourne on April 29, 2009
Posted in: Technique & Tutorials. Tagged: .
Copyright Scott Bourne 2009 - All Rights Reserved

Copyright Scott Bourne 2009 - All Rights Reserved

I scouted around some of the areas outside the park and found this great view on the Jardine Road. This also happens to be my first ever photo made with the Nikon 16mm F/2.8 fisheye lens. I love the look of a fisheye lens on a full-frame camera body (in this case a D3.)

I promise not to be “that guy” who posts nothing but fisheye shots from now on, but I have to say I am very impressed. The Nikon 16 is well made, sharp, bright and easy to use. Some of the cheaper fisheye lenses I’ve tested don’t make as good an impression.

Yellowstone is one of those places that it’s very easy to get in a rut shooting the same iconic shots you see from everyone else.

What I like about this shot is that it’s an unusual view of the park from an unusual location made with an unusual lens.

Fred Johnson (yes THAT Fred Johnson – the ex-Lightroom guy now helping me teach Aperture – go figure) has arrived. Cathy Chung who was a winner of our first workshop in the Teton National Park is on this trip as our documentarian. Today, Steve Simon arrives. Our fourth instructor, Gary Hamburgh is already in Gardiner scouting some locations around the beautiful Highway 89 route between Livingston and Gardiner.

The four winners arrive today. We’ll all head to Gardiner to get our orientation out of the way, show some images and give everyone their first quick Aperture class.

I’m looking forward to all of it.

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The Right Lens For The Right Shot

Posted by scottbourne on January 20, 2009
Posted in: Tips. Tagged: .

I could have used any lens to photograph this cactus in Arizona. But I wanted to highlight the flowers at the base of the cactus and to do that, I needed a very wide angle lens.

I used a Canon fisheye lens to make this shot – yes it’s from back in the days when I shot Canon.

Super wide lenses tend to cause barrel distortion. I could have removed that in Photoshop but in this case, it helped the shot in my opinion.

When you pick a lens, make sure you know why you’re using it. Don’t just randomly select a lens. Have a purpose in mind like I did, trying to highlight the flowers. That helps set you apart as a photographer rather than just a snapshooter.

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