The biggest problem you’ll encounter while using a 180º circular fisheye lens like the Sigma 8mm is keeping your feet out of the picture. Peek inside a room while looking through the viewfinder and you’ll see everything.
The biggest problem you’ll encounter while using a 180º circular fisheye lens like the Sigma 8mm is keeping your feet out of the picture. Peek inside a room while looking through the viewfinder and you’ll see everything—including the doorframe. It’s a unique visual experience, and the images you can create with a fisheye are equally one-of-a-kind.
Be warned that unless you have a full-frame DSLR like the Canon 5D used in this article you will not see the circular image. Cameras equipped with APS-C sized sensors (which is to say most cameras) use a reduced portion of the total image, that’s why there is a “lens factor” (i.e., your 50mm lens becomes the equivalent of an 80mm after the 1.6X multiplier is applied on a Canon Rebel, for example).
But you still get some crazy effects. The image below was shot with a Pentax *ist DS and a Pentax 10-17mm fisheye zoom. It’s not 180º and clearly not circular, but if you look carefully you can still see one of my toes at the bottom.
Fisheye lenses are difficult to make for many reasons, not the least of which is distortion. When a lens designer is creating an optical system that can see 180º some distortion is intentional—it must be designed in, otherwise it would not be possible to produce such a sweeping view. So be prepared for a new experience the first time you use one.
The Sigma 8mm f3.5 has a beefy, solid feel and tips the scales at the healthy 14 ounces. The lens contains 11 elements arranged in six groups (see chart below) and focuses down to a mere 5.3 inches. Be careful when focusing close-up, though—objects in viewfinder are closer than they appear! Because of the extreme wideangle effect, things look much smaller, so be careful not to smack into your subject while creeping up on it with the camera at eyelevel.
Cosmetically the Sigma 8mm fisheye—like nearly all Sigma lenses—is an understated, muted gray with a grip-friendly texture. The large front element (see below) glows like a jewel when it catches the sun’s rays. You can see the repeating pattern of the separate lens elements as you rotate the lens laterally.
The lens is very simple to use but requires some common sense. The depth-of-field—as you’d no doubt guess—is phenomenal, and the lens operates in fully autofocus mode. But care must be taken to assure the horizon remains horizontal and in the place you want it. Or not—you can easily intentionally distort the horizon to make it bend like a rainbow. That’s the beauty of fisheye lenses. Just make sure that you get what you like—instead of liking what you get.
Take a look at the shot below. You can see trees scattered across a severely curved horizon, a collection of flowers in the middle, and my torso (complete with Nikon D5000) at the bottom. The circular image and the solid black border surrounding it immediately identify the image as a fisheye shot. This is not the effect you’d want if you were shooting a group of friends at a wedding, but for creative expression, it’s hard to beat.
From an artistic, compositional point-of-view, I tried to find circular elements that I could capture more-or-less normally but embed them in a surrealistic design that repeated the roundness. An example is below.
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You can also make straight lines do round tricks in unexpected ways. Look for continuous series of parallel lines and allow the fisheye to bend them into an arc. The shot below is of a snack bar at a popular New Jersey beach. The combination of warped paver stones, building blocks and overhead gap rafters produces an interesting texture that only a fisheye lens can properly portray.
You can also turn the ordinary into the extraordinary by allowing converging parallels to pull the viewers’ eyes along a particular path. In the example below, the path is quite literal, but it doesn’t have to be.
Alternatively, you can also turn ordinary, everyday subjects into theatrical graphic statements by finding the right angle. It’s not easy—in that the Sigma fisheye sees an unforgiving 180°— but if it were easy, anyone could do it. In the example below, a relatively ordinary tree becomes the spectacular archetype of what a shade tree should look like.
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