Walking With The Pergear Fisheye Lens

Playground, Cole Valley in San Francisco

"...Hopefully the Pergear  (fisheye lens) will arrive early next week. The next images you'll be seeing will be from the new lens. How many of them totally depends on whether it becomes my new muse, or spends the rest of its life on the Island of Misfit Toys..."

Quoting myself, I did have high hopes for the lens. My experiments proved the lens to be darn-near eyelash sharp, and capable of creating some unusual selfies due to its ability to focus as close as 0.3 meter, about one foot. In this post I described a workaround for using a flash to balance foreground and background exposure. It is also as full frame fisheye, so the out-of-camera images are rectangular and not round.

The lens has some good qualities. It's well made, nicely finished, and as I mentioned can be adjusted for reasonably sharp focus at short working distances. The focusing lever is recessed in the lens barrel, and while very resistant to accidental bumping, is also difficult to grasp. I don't fault it for not having more precise distance settings, but it is a fisheye lens.

In many ways, the lens is like the proverbial "solution looking for a problem". I photographed this wooden lattice in an attempt to turn something commonplace into something out of the ordinary.

This photo of a decorative garden lattice was my first attempt. To gain some perspective, the dark stains are from the metal fasteners and can be assumed to be pointing straight down. Really not an image to encourage a state of inner peace, but just the sort of visual distortion I wanted to play with. Closer examination point out a possible limitation for the lens.

Even at F 8.0 there wasn't enough depth of field to bring the sidewalk the focal midpoint, and the "foreground" into critical focus. I suspect that the overall sharpness of the photo would have been better if I had access to a much smaller shooting aperture.

I must assume this was some sort of inflatable party decoration that found its way into the trash. I knew the colors wouldn't be saturated when I made the photo, but it does have some potential if I want to do some post production on it. The main takeaway is that it looks like a normal photo if you have no straight lines near the edges. If you look closely you can see the planter box has curved slightly, and the lines in the sidewalk aren't perfectly straight.

The image at the top of this post just illustrates that subjects that are round to begin give no clues to the distortion caused by the lens. Here the foam rubber squares in this play area aren't prominent enough to warn the viewer of the distortion. I'm sure that if I had used a conventional 10mm wide angle lens the image would have been identical.

I may not carry this lens again because I cannot pre-visualize how the final image might appear. Using it became less about anticipating and more about imagining possible images. It has proven itself to be quite sharp, but each time I "chimped" an image, I felt more surprise than validation when I compared what I saw on the LCD with what was in my mind's eye/ camera.

I guess this lens is indeed the proverbial "solution looking for a problem".