I felt that I needed to try something different with my fall photography this year. My first experiment this year is with a fisheye lens. For a long time, I have thought about purchasing the Nikon 8-15mm zoom fisheye lens, but it is expensive and I could never convince myself that I would use such a lens enough to justify the expense. Consequently, I began to look at alternative fisheye lenses. One photographer reviewing such lenses gave a nod to the older Nikon 16mm prime fisheye. I found a good used one of these for less than $300 – a price I was willing to pay.
This blog series will show some of my results shooting fall photos with the Nikon 16mm fisheye, which is a small lens. It felt strange walking around with a big DSLR and a tiny lens, since I was accustomed to shooting with much larger lenses like the massive Nikon 14-24mm, the Nikon 24-70mm and sometimes the Nikon 80-400mm.
It might be small, but this lens has a really wide 180 degree view. It is so wide that one has to be careful not to get a tripod leg or a foot or some other unwanted object in a shot. To avoid the tripod issue, I shot completely handheld. Occasionally, I did get a foot or part of a leg in shots without realizing it until I viewed the images on a large monitor. The super wide angle causes some problems with compositions, too.
I made no attempt to apply lens corrections, since it was the fisheye distortion that I wanted. (I did experiment with lens corrections to see what would happen. Sometimes the corrections resulted in “normal” looking images. Sometimes the corrections resulted in some correction, but introducing other distortions).
To be continued,
Ken
