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 my Pergear Pancake Fisheye's days are numbered.