Shopping For Another Fisheye Lens

Photo Source: Click here.

I spent another morning with my Pergear 10mm F 8.0 Fisheye Pancake lens. It's compact, lightweight, and scaleless focusing makes it a carefree lens. It can be fun just guestimating the sensor plane to subject distance, but this fisheye is especially forgiving when it comes  to setting the proper distance.  If you're really off, the results can be a less-than-sharp masterpiece, but sometimes even the errors in judgement can be fun.

As you can see, the focusing scale is lacking in suggested distance markings, giving you basically two marked settings: .0.3 meters, or infinity. If I wanted to take the time to establish some known distances, I could easily file a small grove in the knurled body to identify specific distances, which would give me a more accurate way to achieve sharp/er images. There would be one problem: To see the marks I would have to invert the camera as the focusing lever in on the lower half of the lens body. Frankly, I'm surprised that I thought of it.

Photo Source: Click here.

While idly screen-shopping for a new fisheye, I found that Astrhori was making a reboot of my old favorite. For all intents and purposes it's the same lens, but has a "focusing scale" on the side of the lens. This appeared to be a more convenient placement for the distance scale, and I was about to purchase one until I took a closer look at the photo. Yes there was a side mounted distance scale, but I couldn't find an index mark of any kind to align with either of the two precisely determined distances. Maybe I'm a bit of a nit-picker, but if I'm actually going to use this lens, these things matter. For the moment, my enthusiasm has cooled a bit, but I'm still glad I found it.

I bought mine here.

The New Contender: I continued to search for viable alternatives to the original Pergear, even though my idea for marking the focusing ring with predetermined distance marks made a lot of sense. However, this new (to me) lens just popped up. It's a Pergear 10mm F 5.6. As it stands, it has a log going for it. It has the distance scale on the side, just as I wanted. It has a cut four-petal lens hood for additional style points. In short, it's a petite hottie of a lens. There is one puzzlement. I found a similar lens under the Brighten Star brand.

Ah, but there is one flaw, at least on paper. While its fixed aperture isn't really an issue, the aperture diameter is. Here's why.

This photo's exposure settings were F 5.6, to match the fixed aperture of the Brighten Star lens, 1/250 of  a second to match the minimum flash synchronization exposure setting on my Fuji X-T1 body, and ISO 100, the lowest native ISO setting available. The shot was made just before noon, and it tells me that I would be unable to render the sky any darker. This could be a problem when trying to use flash during the middle of the day. Due to the design of the lens, there is not way to attach a neutral density filter in front of the lens, and no provisions for mounting one behind it. 

Shots like these, taken before sunrise, would still be possible, but as the sky got brighter, I couldn't duplicate the effect. I may yet push the Purchase Button on this lens, and see how it fits into my normal shooting schedule.

By the time you ready this, my Brighten Star branded lens should have arrived. At under $60.00, it a bit of cheap fun!

Woke Up It Was A Fisheye Morning

The local heat wave has finally broken, and to celebrate, I resumed my morning walk with a camera on my shoulder. I mounted my small  10mm F 8.0 Pergear Fisheye lens on a lounging Fuji X-1 body. I also had a Flash Q20 II. Whether conscious or  not, I brought the flash because I knew that I'd be looking for interesting foreground subjects juxtaposed against a wide expanse of background. With a flash in my pocket, I could use it whenever an interesting foreground subject was conveniently positioned in the shadow of something much bigger. This particular flash has a unique trick; The "foot" serves as a wireless controller when detached from flash's main body.

For most of my shots, I was able to just keep the flash head pointed straight ahead, which was the case in this shot.  Now the lens has a fixed aperture of F 8.0, so if I choose to use a flash at the minimum sync speed of 1/180 of a second, I may need to adjust my ISO setting to get the desired exposure of the background, which in this case is the sky. Then I can adjust the flash illumination by increasing or decreasing the flash output, or by increasing or decreasing the flash-to-subject distance. In this case the flash was mounted on the camera, so output adjustments were made in the flash.

When working at distances as short as one foot, this tiny flash can have an enormous effect on your exposure. And due to the rotating head feature, you can achieve a different look by rotating the flash head straight up and bouncing the light off of one's open palm. This may not improve the quality of the light significantly, but will effectively position your light slightly higher above the lens axis. Notice that the light in this photo is still quite harsh, but the higher angle improves the highlight slightly. Before my next outing, I am going to find some place to stow a sheet of aluminum foil to serve as a better, more color neutral bounce surface.

Order your replacement here.

Kaput: I had not used this particular FlashQ unit (I own two) for quite a while, and when I attempted to use it off camera, the detached foot/controller refused to communicate with the flash itself, in spite of my resuscitation efforts in the field. My luck was no better when I tried it with a different flash, so I must assume that it just died from unknown causes. Luckily for me the foot/remote was available separately, and I just ordered one. Having a spare controller can be advantageous if you have two cameras and to give each one the ability to trigger you off-camera remote flash, a tactic I've used many times. It galls me to think this component would be fini after only four years of infrequent use, but it was, and the solution will cost me about $30.00, a small price to pay to get this show back on the road.

The next day, I carried the same camera with my other FlashQ that would work off camera. In this shot there are few vertical lines, and therefore few hints the shot was made with a fisheye lens. These shots were made by my taking a wild guess to the subject-to-film plane distance, since the lens only had two defined distances: .3 meter, and infinity. Halfway between these points is halfway between those two delimiters.

I'm starting to get the itch to buy another fisheye lens. There are three newish APS format 7.5mm manual focus lenses that are available at a good price. There are several full frame fisheyes that could potentially make my Sony A7 much heavier and less wieldy, and are a bit more expensive. Perhaps this Pergear Pancake Fisheye's days are numbered.