8-15mm Fisheye

Considering the purchase of a 8-15mm Fisheye lens. I have no real need for it and actually am wondering how much I would use it. What I would really like is a 8-15mm or thereabouts non Fisheye lens. I had a 10-22mm EFS lens which was a perfect Wide Angle lens but have since moved to a Full Frame camera and thus the EFS lenses do not fit.

Anybody with the 8-15? Do like? Do you use it often or in what situations do you use it?

I have one but have never used it aside from test shots. I tested it and put it back in its box. I contemplated selling for a long time but got lazy and let it sit.

If you're looking for the FOV of the 10-22, look at the current 16-35's. They are superb.

I've one. It's a specialty lens, with limited but useful applications. Panos are one of them.

Rural road
City Hall

It can also be used for unconventional perspectives on a number of images, even portraits.

It is, however, NO substitute for a rectilinear ultra-wide angle.

Oh my gosh. You just blew my mind with that Rual Road 360 pano. I consider myself pretty good with 6-12 photos stitched together for a nice pano but holy cow nothing like a 360.

Please, please tell me how or what program does this so seamlessly. These are superb!

That's Garden Gnome's Pano2VR.

The fisheye gives you the advantage of less shots and better stitching.

Paired with a pano head such as the Nodal Ninja R10, you can get those panos without much hassle (most of the hassle is removing yourself and your rig and related shadows from a scene).

The city hall pano, for which I did not want to shoot the ground required only 4 shots @ ~12mm. It can be done with three with the fisheye, but, well, what the heck, you're already there.

It's a fun lens to have, definitely provides a different perspective on things !

IMAGE LINK: https://mikester.smugm​ug.com …Prix/i-mLKCX32/A&lb=1&s=A

2016 Long Beach Grand Prix

They're also useful for circular subjects (church cupolas, aircraft interiors, &c.), where you'd get practically no distortion.

https://photography-on-the.net …showthread.php?​p=18254674

I have one, it can be lots of fun but it's kind of hard to use it well. Certainly you can easily end up with your own legs and even torso in the shot if you're not quite careful. Also, if the horizon is not dead centre then things can quickly start to look very strange.

These days I only use it when I have plenty of time to seek a good shooting position & experiment a bit, and where the shots aren't critical to me. If I want to be more sure of achieving results I'm happy with, I'll take a conventional lens. Even the 11-24 f4 counts as a 'conventional' lens compared to the 8-15 . That gives an extremely wide perspective without being fish-eye; it's also challenging to use well and produces other types of distortion, besides being very expensive.

It's a specialty lens, produces distorted images, and is a definite yes if you like that sort of thing.

Disagree with others in the thread. Yes, it will do panos BUT with great distortion. Look at the 360 example. Stop on any given moment. Look at that "image." very distorted on both sides.

As to hard to use, quite the opposite. Because of the focal length, set it on one fstop and shoot all day. On a FF camera, set at 10mm with an aperture of f8 the depth of field is 1.2 feet to infinity. At f11 the DOF is .9 feet to infinity. Less than a foot.

With a fisheye it's all about the distorted look. Below are two examples. If you like the distorted look, it's a go. If you do not, don't get it.

Fisheye - field of flowers
Fisheye - Hike thru flowers

Needless to say, on both shots the field of view is basically flat.

It's certainly easy to get everything in the frame in focus. Making pleasing images is another matter and much harder.

This lens will allow you to do things no other lens can. In rounded areas like stadiums it can give fantastic results. The distortion looks great in the right situation. It can also look pointless and silly and overdone. Like all wide lenses, it exaggerates the distances between things which are closer to it & those which are further away.

I'm glad I bought mine, even though I rarely use it. I'd say buy one, experiment, enjoy & if you don't think it's worth keeping you can always sell it

This was my own xmas-gift to myself this year as I want to become a little more "arty" in my shooting. My only system camera is the 1DmkIV so I can't go full circle yet, but a full frame camera is on my wishlist. But a tilt & shift-lens is even more wanted when I photograph paintings for personal artexhibitions (catalogues). I have so far used it for shots in very confined areas (like small chapel) and I like the results. Also the idea that you get a fisheye and an extreme wide angle lens in one unit was important to me. Remains to test it for scenery shots, but that will come in due time.