Today’s Post by Joe Farace
“If you want to see a better world, change the lens through which you see it and do the work to make it better.” ― Jeffrey G. Duarte
I once traded lenses with an old friend. I traded him an L-mount lens that I only used once for a Lumix G Fisheye 8mm f/3.5 lens for the Micro Four-thirds system and think it was a win-win for both us.
It’s a Fisheye?
I can hear some of you asking now, “You probably won’t use that lens much!” But I don’t agree. I love shooting with wide-angle lenses. One of the first lenses that I bought after I got my (first) brand-new Nikon F2 back in 1971 was Sigma’s 16mm f/2.8 full-frame fisheye lens. I love that lens. It was ca;;ed a “Filtermatic” lens and had built in colored filters that you could change bu rotating a ring around the camera barrel..
A fisheye lens is an ultra wide-angle lens that achieves an extremely wide field-of-view by forgoing producing images that have straight lines of perspective (aka rectilinear), opting for an equisolid angle that gives the images it produces a characteristic convex non-rectilinear appearance. 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 lenses that produce circular images, and 15–16mm for more rectilinear images. The Lumix G Fisheye 8mm f/3.5 lens, for example, has a 180 degree angle-of-view.
Because of its modest maximum aperture, the beautifully finished Lumix G Fisheye 8mm f/3.5 is a small lens and weighs just 5.82 oz. The optical design features one extra-low dispersion element to maintain clarity and color accuracy. Individual elements are multi-coated and it has a built-in (albeit small) lens hood to minimize lens flare and ghosting for increased contrast. The lens has a stepping AF motor and internal focuses for quick, quiet, and smooth focusing for video and photo.
How I Made this Shot: One of the first things I did with the Lumix 8mm f/3.5 the lens was mount it on a Panasonic Lumix G6 that was converted for infrared capture. Next I headed to McCabe Meadows in Parker, Colorado, one of my favorite local place to shoot infrared images. It was not quite Noon—the best infrared capture time—so flare, not unexpectedly, popped into a number of my frames including the one featured, even with the built-in lens hood. On the Joe Farace sunstar scale I would give it a 3.5 (out of five.)
Obviously there is some distortion on this shot, which might offend some purists but I though it would be fun, which, if you remember is the motto of this blog. Exposure with a Lumix G6 was 1/400 sec at f/16 and ISO 400. The camera was converted for infrared capture by LifePixel using their Enhanced Infrared (665nm) filter. The RAW file was opened in Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop CS6 and then converted to monochrome using Silver Efex with a dash of Glamour Glow from Color Efex Pro tossed in for good measure before Platinum toning via PhotoKit.
I’ve found that Life Pixel does a great job with IR conversions and they’ve done most of the conversions for my Canon DSLRs and all my Panasonic Lumix G-series cameras. This is not a paid or sponsored endorsement, just my experience.
Used copies of my book, The Complete Guide to Digital Infrared Photography are currently available from Amazon starting around $5, as I write this. Creative Digital Monochrome Effects has a chapter on IR photography and new copies are available from Amazon for $16.16 with used copies starting at less than seven bucks, which seems like a heckuva deal.