Good Day and welcome to National Chocolate Soufflé Day, a special day that celebrates a delicious dessert on February 28th each year.
Today’s Post by Joe Farace
There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. —Steven Wright
This past Sunday Mary and I were taking a walk through McCabe Meadows. And no, I did not have a camera with me, I know, I know… While taking a break and sitting on the bench you can see here, our neighbor Mike came along wearing a camera backpack and using a monopod as a walking stick. He’s a guy who got interested in Micro Four-Thirds cameras after I showed him my Olympus and Panasonic cameras and he had his Olympus E-M5 Mark II and associated gear with him. Naturally we talked about photography. During our chat, I suggested he try the Olympus 9mm f/8 fisheye lens because it might be a fun way to break through any photographic ruts he might be experiencing.A Fish Eye alternative
When it comes to lenses, the term fisheye was first used in 1906 by American physicist and inventor Robert W. Wood who thought the images from such a lens might be how a fish would see an ultra-wide hemispherical view from beneath the water. Yes, this is the same Robert Wood who defined the “Wood effect” in infrared photography. Fisheye lenses were widely used during the 1920’s by meteorologists to study cloud formations, who gave them the nickname “whole-sky lenses,” a term that hung around for a long time,
For today’s photographers, a fisheye lens is typically considered to be an ultra wide-angle lens that can produce strong visual distortion and can be used to create a panoramic or hemispherical image. The angle-of-view of a fisheye lens is usually between 100 and 180 degrees, with (full-frame) focal lengths ranging from 8-10mm for circular images and 15–16mm for rectilinear images but those focal lengths vary by manufacturer and sensor size. Fisheye lenses achieve extremely wide angles-of-view by not worrying about producing images that have straight lines or a rectilinear perspective. Others lenses, such as the Laowa 4mm f/2.8 Fisheye lens opt for an equisolid look—think mirrorball effect—which gives the images they produce a convex non-rectilinear appearance. Because of their design complexity, most fisheye lenses are expensive or relatively expensive, depending on your point of reference. All of which brings me to the inexpensive Olympus 9mm f/8 fisheye lens.
How I Made this Photo: Here’s yet another image of the gazebo in O’Brien Park in downtown Parker, Colorado. This time it was made with the Olympus 9mm f/8 fisheye lens that was attached to a 16-megapixel Olympus E-M10 Mark I with an exposure of 1/3200 sec at f/8 and ISO 800. Placing the gazebo near the center of the frame ensures that its straight lines remain straight.
The Olympus Fisheye Body Cap 9mm f/8 lens from OM System, although introduced in 2014, is an 18mm (equivalent) lens that was designed for Micro Four Thirds mirrorless cameras from Olympus and Panasonic. This 0.5-inch (1.27cm) thick lens resembles a camera’s body cap and has a 140-degree angle-of-view,. While it seems thin, the lens features a pair of aspherical elements that are designed to reduce spherical aberrations and control distortion and there’s much less barrel distortion than you might expect for such an inexpensive optic. Tip: Part of the secret of minimizing distortion—it can never be totally eliminated in camera—is keeping the camera straight, left to right and front to back. Tilting the camera will only exacerbate any distortion.
This is a manual focus lens and the manual focus lever is similar to the control on the Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens that some have called the worst Micro Four-thirds lens—I don’t agree. When working with distant subjects, the focusing control can be set to Deep Focus (infinity symbol) or Close-Up for photographing subjects as close as 7.9-inches, that’s marked 0.2m on the lens. In between is an intermediate setting (it’s a dot) that I’m currently testing—no EXIF data—to see what it really is because I haven’t found a definitive answer on what the actual focus distance is. The fourth position closes and protects the lens. Some advice: From time to time, you should check the focus position because it can get easily bumped. It’s not as bad as on the 15mm Body Cap lens but it’s something to be aware of.
There is no DxO rating for this lens, not that there’s for the 15mm Body Cap lens either. I didn’t do a “Brick Wall” test with the 9mm lens because I felt the lack of precise focusing made any results suspect. BUT, if anyone is interested in me doing a Brick Wall test with this lens anyway, let me know and I’ll slap it onto my highest resolution (20-megapixels) Olympus Pen F and give it a try and report back to you,
Was my friend interested in trying the Olympus 9mm f/8 fisheye lens? He said, “I don’t know what I would do with it.” You might, however, so it’s another thing to think about when trying to shoot your way out of a creative rut. You never know, looking at the world through a 140 degree field-of-view may open new horizons for you.
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Along with photographer Barry Staver, Joe is co-author of Better Available Light Digital Photography with new, used and Kindle copies are available from Amazon.