Luminous Landscape Forum
Equipment & Techniques => Cameras, Lenses and Shooting gear => Topic started by: RFPhotography on August 20, 2013, 02:25:50 pm
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Have wanted a fisheye lens for a while. They're generally pretty expensive. I already had the Rokinon 85mm f1.4 and liked it so when I saw they were coming out with a new, version II, of their fisheye lens, decided to look into it. There are no reviews of it that I can find on the web. Ordered it in and took it out the other night for a bit of a test run. This is the Nikon variant and it has the AE chip that is available on many Rokinon lenses for setting the aperture automatically on the camera rather than the lens.
It's small and lightweight. The focus ring is nicely damped and very smooth. Build quality is very good, it feels very solid. Non-rotating front element (but there's no way to attach filters anyway), internal focus. From the test shots I did, image quality seems quite good. Some colours, particularly in the red family, seem to be very saturated but I'll need to play with it some more to see if that's a characteristic of the lens or just something that happened this one time. There is a shot where CA would rear its ugly head if it were a problem. It doesn't seem that it is. There is some purple fringing but I had to zoom in to 100% or more to see it and it cleaned up quite nicely in Lightroom 4.
The purple fringing shots are in the next post.
Overall, for a little under $300 I'm pretty pleased.
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Purple fringing. The first is the overall shot. The next two are crops of areas where it showed up. The last is with it corrected.
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No real tests of sharpness because everything was handheld, and given the lighting conditions, shutter speeds were slow but this one was a bit faster at 1/100. The original shot and the cropped area, straight out of the camera, no sharpening applied.
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Thanks. I have been considering this for fun astro-landscape and for cloud photography. OK, so I am a geek, and often shoot photos for documentation as well as artistic impact.
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Last week I bought the Opteka 6.5 f3.5 fish eye which I am reliably informed is the same lens with a different name. Used it only once and I am also impressed. An image of my home town.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/99408200@N05/9536036353/
It is small and can fit in a reasonably sized pocket. Because of the width you get great depth of field at about the equivalent of f/11 so you don't have to manually focus, only expose. For a pano shooter then you can crop to get a very wide pano. The link I posted cropped down nicely because when I took the image I had it vertically aligned to the scene. In the UK it was £209 from amazon. :)
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Nancy, I'm headed to a dark sky preserve in September for stars and, hopefully, Aurora. I'll have two cameras shooting simultaneously and plan to use this lens some of the time.
Stamper, Opteka is, I believe, one of the other names Rokinon lenses are sold under (Samyang, Bower are a couple others). Did you shoot that on a full frame camera?
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I've got this as well. Samyang 8mm f/3.5 HD CSII, EF-S mount.
Still adjusting to how to use a fish-eye (and not bumping into things when using it hand-held).
-h
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Nancy, I'm headed to a dark sky preserve in September for stars and, hopefully, Aurora. I'll have two cameras shooting simultaneously and plan to use this lens some of the time.
Stamper, Opteka is, I believe, one of the other names Rokinon lenses are sold under (Samyang, Bower are a couple others). Did you shoot that on a full frame camera?
It was on a Nikon d600 with the petal hood removed.
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It was on a Nikon d600 with the petal hood removed.
That makes sense.
h, yep I understand. Or getting your own feet or tripod legs in the shot. On this particular night I was out with a friend shooting and a couple times I had to ask him to move because he was in the shot. He was standing right at my shoulder. 180 degrees is a big-ass angle of view. ;D