Where Do Fisheye Lenses Work Best?

Because of the creation of unusual images, fisheye lenses are often unfairly regarded as special effects lenses. However, due to the curvilinear way of the fisheye on the periphery, using it in the right way can help you take images with unique distortions on common views. By dealing with this distortion, you can create something very special.

Ⅰ. What is a fisheye lens?

In photography, there are basically two types of lenses: straight and curved. The linear lens captures the straight line as a straight line and reproduces what the eye sees. This is the category that most lenses belong to, including wide-angle lenses. However, a fisheye lens is a curvilinear lens because it can provide you with a hemispherical view, the distorted view that the fish sees. This is called barrel distortion and can cause curves to appear on the periphery of the photo. The larger the shooting range, the more obvious the effect. Since the wide-angle lens is a linear lens, if you shoot the same scene at 12mm on a fisheye lens, and then shoot at 12mm on a wide angle, you will see more fisheye scenes.

Ⅱ. Where do fisheye lenses work best?

When shooting with a fisheye lens, one of the most important things to remember is that small changes in the viewfinder can have a huge impact on the composition. If you are photographing buildings, make sure your camera is completely horizontal and the lens is perpendicular to the scene.

1. A fisheye lens is very suitable for shooting indoor environments, because you may not be able to step back far enough to contain the entire scene in one shot.

2. Objects close to the camera look much larger than those far away, so the fisheye lens design is an ideal choice when you want to emphasize proportions.

3. Fisheye lenses are almost always used for underwater photography without worrying about straight lines. Compared with linear lenses, they can also produce clearer, brighter images.

4. Shooting the horizon? Depending on your composition, you can use a fisheye lens to enhance the curvature of the earth.

5. The short focal length is very suitable for action shooting where you want to keep the background-you can get very close to the subject, but you can still capture a lot of background.

6. The fisheye camera lens is suitable for specific landscape shooting. There is no distortion in the center, so the lines passing through the center horizontally or vertically look completely straight. Taking a landscape with the horizon as the center, it looks like it was shot with a straight lens, and objects close to the camera seem to stretch towards you. This effect is particularly suitable for beach scenes-the horizon remains straight, while the front edge of the tide is distorted towards the audience.

7. Fisheye lenses are also called "all-sky lenses", and it is not surprising that fisheye lenses are suitable for astrophotography. Compared with a wide-angle lens, it not only provides a huge angle of view, but also provides more light, so you can shoot faster and avoid terrible star trails.