Indiana Fall 2024 – A Fish Out of Water – Part 1 – Ken's Photography and Travel Blog

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).