Why Use a Fisheye Camera Lens? What is the Difference between It and Ultra Wide Angle Lens?

360° panoramic photography usually uses 8-15mm fisheye camera lenses. The main reason why you must choose a fisheye camera lens for panoramic photography for 360° panoramic photography is to take a single photo to a larger viewing angle, so that fewer photos can be stitched into a 360° panoramic image. In short, it is to use a short focal length to obtain a large angle of view, stitching panoramic images with a smaller number of shots, reducing the workload of shooting and post-stitching time.

The longer the focal length of the lens, the narrower the viewing angle. The fisheye camera lens is considered a powerful tool for shooting three-dimensional panoramas because it has a wide viewing angle, efficient shooting, and the image quality basically meets Internet browsing.

The main difference between a fisheye lens and an ordinary ultra-wide-angle lens is the size of the angle of view and whether to correct the image distortion. For example, a 13mm ultra-wide-angle lens, its field of view is only 118°, and a 17mm fisheye lens has the field of view reaching 180°. The ultra-wide-angle lens, like other lenses, strives to correct the distortion that appears at the edge of the picture, and strive to make the picture taken in line with the real thing.

The fisheye camera lens deliberately preserves the barrel distortion of the image to exaggerate its distortion effect. Except for the central part, all the straight lines in the captured image become curved arcs. There are two basic types of fisheye camera lenses: one is a circular fisheye lens, which is used to shoot a circular image on the film with the width of the film as the diameter. The other is a diagonal fisheye lens, which produces a full-frame rectangular deformed image of the negative.