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Just a sunny and cloudless day in the suburbs

I own a fisheye lens for about 5 years now and I absolutely love it.  It is small and neat and easy to carry with you.

Of course, this is not what makes a fisheye lens special…It’s this: normal rectalinear lenses disfigure curved lines. Fisheye lenses disfigure straight lines, but treat curved ones gently. Also, a fisheye has a viewing angle of at least 180 degrees, which is very useful in large and spacious buildings.

So, large buildings with lots of arches. That sounds a lot like a church, doesn’t it?  Indeed it does. It’s in these places where a fisheye lens feels like a fish in holy water.

Anyway…see for yourself.

It may sound like a made-up word, but it’s a real thing. It looks a bit like a round and small accordion, but instead of sound, it produces pictures (when mounted on a camera of course).

Here’s a small picture of the lens in its’ simplest form:

cute…isn’t it?

Focussing is done by pressing down the lens. The focal plane can be shifted by pressing one side of the lens a little bit more than the other (while maintaining focus…which is, as I found out, the hard part). Changing the aperture is done by removing the aperture ring and replacing it with a different version (the lens comes with about four seperate rings varying from f/2.8 to f/8).

Unlike its’ hughly expensive tilt&shift cousins, the lens is very cheap. Also, because of the kind of random results you get, it is great fun to use.

Of course one might get random results from a professional lens by dropping it on the kitchen floor from a considerable height, but this is usually considered less fun.

Sometimes you have to keep things simple.

(so is dropping an expensive lens to the kitchen floor, but I’m not here to argue).

Here are some of my babysteps.

Czech for “Closely watched trains”

Icelandic for ‘endless’

A small glance at Highland Park Distillery (Kirkwall. Orkney Islands, Scotland)

there’s beauty in it..