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!