For years I avoided fisheye lenses. To me, taking travel photographs is all about bringing back the experience of locations, people, and cultures to share then with the viewer. The radical distortion of a fisheye lens seemed to imprint its own personality on a subject, distracting from the essence of the original experience. Then I bought a Nikkor 10.5mm to try out spherical photography, and accidentally discovered the power of the fisheye as a tool for travel photography!
The first place where the fisheye lens shows its power is indoors. The Nikkor has a 180° view (corner to corner), and can easily fill the frame when you can't step back from your subject. The ultra-wide angle naturally creates leading lines, and allows you to shoot at quite slow speeds in low light conditions while still holding a remarkable depth of field. The first image was taken in Pike's Place Market, Seattle, where several TPN photographers met last August.
The 10.5mm has the ability to focus (using a close-range correction system) down to less than 6 inches (14cm). When you consider that this distance is measured from the sensor, and since the lens itself is just over 4 inches (10.8cm) long, the fisheye can focus on a subject that is only 1-1/4 inches (3.2cm) in front of the glass! If you can shoot at f/22, the hyperfocal distance is about 10 inches, allowing you to get everything from the glass to infinity in focus! The fishmonger was a little concerned about what I was doing just inches from his lobster tails for that second image.
With a fisheye lens, the only lines that will appear straight are ones that pass through the centre of the image. So if you are interested in a horizontal horizon, you need to place it in the middle of the image. The image taken from Sydney Harbour Bridge demonstrates how the horizon will bow when moved higher in the frame, while the image from Fiskardo, Kefalonia shows the bending of vertical lines away from the centre of the image.
When you have limited mobility, a fisheye lens can be a great way to take in an entire scene. Stuck in a box in Stade de France before a rugby game, I was able to capture a nice scene-setting image of the stadium that captured the public viewing screens at each end of the pitch. When moored in a harbour off the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, there was no way to get a foreground object into the frame for a sunset shot except to use the wide angle fisheye, which could see the sun and the nearby yacht off our port bow.
When faced with the confined spaces of a sailboat, my lens of choice is now the fisheye. It captures the environment, and gives the ocean a great vast open quality that captures the spirit of sailing nicely. (Plus the wide-angle has a thinning effect for your subjects in swimsuits!) The sea, the sky, the masts, deck and sails all make great primary graphic shapes which are manipulated by the distortion of the lens to make the resulting image even more dynamic than is possible with a normal lens.
Shooting with a fisheye, one has to get used to including the sun in the frame. Given the 180° view, it's difficult not to include it (unless, of course you're in England where we don't get much sun, but that's another matter). The image taken in an almond grove in rural Mallorca (during the TPN gathering last winter) shows how the lens deals with flare, and the star effect made by a small aperture.
The two chapel images show the power of that a small focal length has in capturing a wide view in a close environment. Last year, artist Miguel Barceló completed a ceramic panorama for St. Peter's Chapel in the cathedral in Palma, which stands in stark contrast to the traditional Gothic style of its other chapels.
The question becomes whether a fisheye lens can be used seriously to capture images of people and events. At a recent corporate gathering in Barcelona, I was asked to shoot a group of people in a Spanish hotel. The best image from the shoot was a staircase shot where the top people were level with the camera and the lowest folks were directly underneath. The dynamic nature of the image helped it stand out from those taken with more traditional focal length lenses.
As the event progressed into the evening in a restaurant in the Port Vell area, the 10.5 was used in a fashion described by Tim Goodspeed in his article Shooting from the Hip last June. Setting the focus on manual at about 12 inches, and setting the aperture as small as practicable, the resulting shots set the scene and captured moments as the festivities began.
Remarkably, as the evening progressed and the light faded, switching to a flash with the fisheye produced an interesting effect. The flash coverage for the flip-up flash on the D200 is not wide enough to accommodate the 10.5mm lens. This created a wonderful vignette effect as the flash illuminated an oval in the centre of the image for night 'clubbing' shots. This technique was subsequently used at a wedding reception on the HMS Belfast in London where the wardroom was way too small and dark for normal photography. In these cases, the fisheye produced great results that stood out from the 'snaps' captured by normal flash photography.
The extreme examples of useable images in a close environment are the two taken inside a Routemaster bus that transported the wedding party and guests across London. In the large version, you can see almost everyone's face on the upper deck of the iconic double decker bus!
Originally the Nikkor 10.5 fisheye was purchased as a novelty lens with limited expectations for use. Over time, I have learned to use it indoors, outdoors, for landscape and people image. It just keeps coming out of the camera bag!
Hank Pennington once reminded me that photographers tend to take their best images at their focal length extremes - regardless of what those extremes are. The 10.5 has certainly pushed my lower limit quite a way down, and the results seem to bear up that theory. The true test of its success is when I review (triage) my images: the fisheye produces a disproportionate number of 'keepers'.
I have gone from fisheye bigot to convert in under a year. There are a number of techniques for 'straightening' out the images that were not discussed here. This is about the joy of using a fisheye to release some creativity, have some fun, and most importantly - to produce some great images.
About the Author
Jim White is the Editor at Travel Photographer Online Magazine. Jim's work can be viewed at JimWhitePhotos.com , in PhotoPortfolios.net , and in the TPN and NPN forums.
