fisheye or wide angle

Hey guys!!

I have one question what wide angle/fisheye do you people have in your kits?

I am in the market for one and can't make up my mind. At this Stage I have a 7d but would like to get a full frame into my arsenal in the future. I'm considering sigma 10-20. Any other to look at?

Samyang 8mm manual focus - it's designed for crop bodies, so you'll get heavy vignetting if you use it on FF, but it's an incredibly sharp wee lens

I have a Sigma 10mm 2.8 Diagonal Fisheye and a Tokina 11-16mm f/2.8 AT-X116 Pro. Both are very sharp on a 7d.

I have the 16-35mm. A brilliant lens! Pretty less distortion for a wide angle lens, and sharp, at least at the center as heck! Corners not even that but but has a bit of vignetting (also normal for UWA).

The thing is, youl get a 28-55mm FOV, so not UWA anymore on crop. But for Fullframe a great piece of glass!

If you get a good copy of the Sigma 10-20, it will be more than enough to satisfy the UWA range needs and be fairly easy to sell off when you do decide to go FF. You can mount the Sigma on FF, but you'd need to use a teleconverter (tamron 1.4x) otherwise you would get pretty hard vignetting. The Tokina 11-16 is also a good choice for crop depending on how you want to use the UWA lens, and you can also mount it on a FF body and use it at 16mm without hard vignetting until you sell it off. The Canon 10-22 is very nice as well. Between the Sigma 10-20, Tokina 11-16, and Canon 10-22, all three are fairly easy to sell when you do go full frame. Since you mention fish eye as well, have you taken a look at the Sigma 8-16mm?

I have the 16-35 II and the 8-15 fisheye. I like the UWA zoom, but I love the fisheye! You can also de-fish as well.

For a lot of people fisheyes are a one trick pony - you will probably get much more use out of a rectilinear lens.

I love the fisheye on a crop sensor. Remeber it's a specialty lens so you will still probably want a wide angle

I'm really digging my Tokina 11-16/2.8 on my 7D. I've played with Canon's 10-22 a bit and it's a super nice piece of glass as well. The lack of zoom range on the Tok isn't an issue for me as I almost always shoot it at 11mm. I absolutely love the perspectives that can be achieved with a rectilinear UWA.

I have a 5D with a 17-40 and 15mm FE. Neither gets a ton of use, but they both have their place in my kit. If I had to ditch one, I'd keep the 17-40.

Tokina 11-16! It will work without vignetting on FF down to 14mm or so (13mm if you take off the hood). I'm not a fan of the fisheye distortion, though I have seen a few shots I like that were taken with one.

There's a lot of difference between fisheye and wide angle (or ultrawide) lenses...

To me, the fisheye is a fairly specialized lens, while a wide angle or ultrawide is much more generally useful. I've owned several fisheyes over the years, but don't presently have one. I rarely go out the door with my gear that an ultrawide or two isn't in my bag.

Let's start with the ultrawide or wide angle lens... for your crop sensor camera you are pretty much limited to zooms... there are few primes that are truly ultrawide on a crop camera.

For crop sensor camera such as your 7D, arguably the best wide angle zoom is the Canon EF-S 10-22mm. It's got great image quality and better flare resistance than most ultrawides. Of course, it's one of the more expensive. And it's lens hood is rather big (and sold separately). As an EF-S lens it is not usable on full frame (well, some people modify it and make it work to a limited degree).

I rank the Tokina 12-24/4 as the second best ultrawide for crop cameras. It feels better built than the Canon, has almost as good image quality and nearly as good flare resistance. It's a lot less expensive than the 10-22. It is partially usable on full frame (to about 18 or 19mm wide), though not really intended for that purpose.

The Tokina 11-16/2.8 might be even sharper than the 12-24, is similarly well made and it's got that f2.8 aperture... I rank it third because it's a bit of a trade off: more expensive than the 12-24 (tho less than the 10-22), much more prone to flare, and the range of focal lengths is extremely narrow.

The Tamron 10-24 and Sigma 10-20 with the variable aperture are the least expensive of the ultrawide options. In tests I did in the past, I found their image quality a bit below that of either Tokina or the Canon. The Sigma sold today is a newer version and might be improved a bit, I dunno because I haven't had a change to try it out. It's got better AF mechanism now, I know for certain.

Sigma also offers a more expensive "premium" version of their 10-20mm, with a non-variable aperture. It's one of the largest of the ultrawide options. They also offer an 8-16mm, which is the widest available non-fisheye lens for crop cameras (it approaches fisheye distortion levels, at the 8mm setting). I haven't used either of these, so can't really comment.

Sigma also offers a 12-24, that's actually a full frame lens. Of course, it's fully usable on crop, too. However, it's one of the most expensive options and has got pretty heavy distortion effects (there are software fixes for that).

About the widest non-fisheye primes is 14mm. There's a Canon 14/2.8L.... a great lens, but you'll want to be sitting down when you look up the price! There also were 14mm Tamron and Sigma in the passt, but they are long discontinued and didn't have nearly as good image quality as even the original Canon 14mm. You might find them used, tho, if interested.

Today there's a manual focus, manual aperture only Rokinon/Samyang 14mm too, that's pretty affordable and has surprisingly good image quality for the money. This lens also sells under a bunch of other brand names, including Bower, ProOptic (Adorama house brand) and Vivitar (where they call it a 13mm). It's the same lens.

In their excellent ZE line, Zeiss is now offering a 15mm. It's a very premium quality lens, although manual focus only. But it's another one you'll want to sit down before looking up the price.

On crop cameras, lenses with longer than 15mm focal length aren't particularly wide. For that reason, I would not recommend trying to "make do" with a full frame ultrawide lens on your crop camera. There are some excellent ones, but for Canon they are 16mm or 17mm wide at most, so you would be missing out on a lot. I had a 17-35 I'd used with film (i.e., full frame) for some time, but found it wasn't near wide enough when I switched to using crop DSLRs.

There are a number of fisheye lenses available. Many are primes in the 8, 10, 15mm focal lengths typically. There are both round and rectalinear fisheye lenses. The round fisheye give a round image with a heavy black border all around it. The rectalinear fisheye fills the entire image frame.

All fisheye lenses have strong distortion effects... any straight lines are "bent" heavily, unless precisely centered in the image. There are softwares that can be used to "de-fish" images.

Focal length of a fisheye isn't equal to the same in a non-fisheye lens. For example, a 15mm "full frame" fisheye lens gives a 180 degree angle of view (when used on a FF camera). A 14mm non-fisheye lens on the same camera gives 104 degree angle of view.

There are a few fisheye zooms (Canon recently introduced one for full frame and crop, Tokina offered one for crop only, not sure if they still do). But most fisheyes are primes. The old standard for a full frame rectalinear fisheye was 15mm... while full frame round fisheye often were 10mm. Now with crop cameras, some are as short as 4mm focal length.

Depth of field with fisheye lenses can be so deep, you might find manual focus to be no problem at all. For that matter, DOF is pretty deep for ultrawide lenses, too... so manual focus might be fine.

I am currently using a Canon 10-22mm and Tokina 12-24/4 with my crop cameras. With full frame, I use a Canon 20/2.8 and in the past have used 17mm and 18mm primes, 17-35 and 16-35 zooms, among others. If I recall correctly, I've only ever used 15mm fisheyes (but, again, don't presently have any).

Whatever you decide, there are some things to learn using wide angle lenses... IMO, it's frequently a different approach than shooting with standard through telephoto lenses. With telephotos you probably often shoot "subtractively", isolating an interesting subject from extraneous details. With wides and ultrawides it's often the opposite... shooting "additively", incorporating a lot more in the view, arranging subjects near, middle distance, and far. It's often almost a different way of thinking, maybe more three dimensional, where a telephoto can be more two dimensional. It can be a lot of fun!

As others said, UWA is a more general purpose lens than fisheye; if you are really into wide angle photography, you'll probably want to get both.

I have the Sigma 10-20 + Samyang 8mm, a great wide angle combo for crop cameras.

You probably should get an UWA first, and if you feel you want even more in the wide angle department, get a fisheye.

I perfer the fisheye look to any extreme wide angle.

If you need to ask fisheye or UWA then the answer is UWA. Granted you can de-fish a fish eye it's easier/better just to start with a rectilinear if you don't want the distortion to begin with.

Fisheyes are more of a specialty lens. I got mine to use underwater were the distortion isn't usually an issue but allows me to get much closer while maintain a very wide FOV(you want to minimize the amount of water you have between and the subject for the best results). I also have the desire for the distortion at times which can be nice when you want to get creative or show a totally different perspective. Also there's times you just want really really wide and the FOV of a 15mm fisheye is much wider than a 15mm rectilinear lens. As you can see in the below picture just how wide it is, the entire length of the drag strip fits in the frame.

IMAGE LINK: http://www.flickr.com …/83602155@N04/8​640758729/