Fisheye fantasies

Fisheye photography requires you to think differently. Fisheye lenses bend vertical and horizontal lines, and while some of you may feel this kind of look isn’t appealing or perhaps it’s ‘gimicky’, it does offer a unique and artistic way of interpreting reality. An important thing to be aware of is the distortion associated with fisheyes. Subjects become more pronounced the closer you get to them. When I photographed the cow, for example, the subject-to-camera distance was about four feet. That’s why the cow fills most of the frame and is so distorted.

Sometimes a fisheye effect can be comedic as in the closeup of a highland cow from Scotland, below. Here the curved horizon seems to work simply because of the humorous subject. In other instances, this kind of distortion embellishes lines that are already curved as in the spiral staircase on the next page. Another interesting aspect of fisheye lenses is that you can control the characteristics of the distortion depending on how you angle the camera. In other words, how you compose the shot impacts how lines are curved. For example, on the next page study the two versions of Horseshoe Bend near Page, Arizona. I took

both pictures with Canon’s 15mm fisheye. The image on the left was composed such that the horizon was placed in the upper third of the frame, resulting in a grossly distorted horizontal line. In the comparison version, I composed the landscape with the horizon in the center of the frame. As a result, this does not distort the line at all.

When you photograph a round subject, such as the spiral staircase in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the distortion appears minimal because you can’t make a circular subject ‘more’ circular. The curved distortion typical of fisheye lenses appears irrelevant because the stair case is already curved.

Similarly, when you point a fisheye lens straight upward, distortion doesn’t seem to appear. The forest picture on the next page was taken in

New Hampshire. Notice the vertical lines of the trees converge in the center of the frame without being curved, and this is virtually identical to what a typical wide angle lens does. Again, I used a 15mm fisheye for this shot.

Two types of fisheyes

There are two types of fisheye lenses: full frame and circular. I prefer the former. All of the images in this article were taken with the full frame 15mm except the picture above. Here I used the 8mm focal length on the Canon 8 - 15mm fisheye lens. The circular fisheye covers 180 degrees in all directions and consequently produces a circular image in the center of the frame. The full frame fisheye covers 180 degrees only along its diagonal, thus producing a frame-filling image. §

PANTANAL PHOTO TOUR

Nov. 8 - 15, 2022

Jaguars in the wild Exotic birds in flight Caiman Giant river otters