The first evening that I used the Fisheye Lens, I just walked around my neighborhood taking photos of random things that I came across. I was mostly trying to get a feel for the lens and see how it worked.
Day 1...
This photo was taken with me laying with my feet next to the trunk of the tree (I deliberately left them in the photo for a little perspective, and you can see them in the bottom right corner ). The tree was near the top of a small hill, so I am laying a bit upside down with my head lower than my feet. If you look at the top left of the photo, you can see the cars that are on the road behind me...
Here is the same photo, but I have inverted it, to give a different view. In this one the street and cars are easier to see...
The instant I saw that photo, and realized just how much of the scene around me the Fisheye Lens could capture, I was in love! I felt like a kid in a candy store - eyes wide open, staring at all the possibilities in front of me!
This next photo was probably more fun to shoot than it is too view. What I really should have done was tried recording a video through the lens to see how it looked. Watching the cars zoom up and down the curves felt like I was watching a kid playing with toy cars on a race track...
Day 2...
All of the following photos were taken just a few miles from our neighborhood. I have no idea what the buildings used to be, but I'm a sucker for old, falling apart, graffiti covered dwellings!
This next photo really shows how much the lens curves things, as the two railroad tracks are parallel to each other in reality...
I hadn't quite learned my lesson about getting close enough with this next image. I was close enough to that wood pile on the right side that I could easily touch it, and it still looks a million miles away! I was checking out how the horizon curved through the lens when I moved it away from the horizontal...
I had read that Fisheye Lens often have a lot of chromatic aberration, and you can really see it in this photo...
One of the practical uses I can see for a Fisheye Lens it to be able to photograph inside of doorways and capture the whole room inside. I never could have gotten the following two shots without it. This photo is taken looking through the door way that is visible in the photo above...
This is another view into the small building taken looking through the doorway that is visible on the left side of the above image...
I then moved on to another nearby building. Those grey metal beams in the foreground of the photo aren't curved in reality!...
This photo is taken looking straight at the wall that is on the left side on the above photo. I love how it curves everything and makes it look like it is bulging out straight at you!...
For this final image of the day, I zoomed in a little bit to use the lens more as a wide angle and minimize the barrel effect. On my camera body, this would be a nice feature of the lens but on a full frame camera this photo would have still been quite distorted (and all of the above photos would have been true circle images instead of just the edges having the black rim like they do)....
So, which one is your favorite? My two favs are the first and the last ones.
I really enjoyed my first two days of shooting with the lens, and felt like I really learned a lot about what I was able to do with it! But, there are lots more photos coming up, so stay tuned for more fun Fisheye pictures in Part 2!
Michele Whitacre is a portrait photographer serving Phoenix, Arizona and the surrounding area. Visit Michele's website at michelewhitacrephotography.com. Become a fan of Michele's work on Facebook. Follow Michele's updates on Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment