fish eye

Two questions:

1. Is fish eye a gimick that you soon get bored with?

2. There seems to be a range of Pentax fit fish eye lenses at the moment. Which do PU members have and how do you rate them?

Dave

1 no.
2 I have the 10-17.... highly recommend it.

Is the 10-17 fish eye throughout the focal range?

yes.

there is a thread here with awesome example shots as well...

link
some fine shots here

Nope

I have the DA 10-17mm. Excellent lens. very sharp

It has a bit of Blue-Yellow CA at the edges but that can easily be tweaked out in Lightroom. I also have a Lightroom Lens profile for it and sometimes I like to use that to De-Fish

I have the 10-17mm too, highly recommend it.
I'm nowhere near as good as the other chaps here but I've just been out with it a few days ago and had some interesting things.
A few pics here (Excuse my post-editing, I was playing with presets.)







Apart from the last one the other two haven't been cropped, none of them have been defished either. If you get the lines right, sometimes the fisheye effect is not seen and it works like a ultra wide zoom! (well, it is in a sense)
Oh, and it's impossible to get bored of it!

1. Yes

2. 10-17mm. How do I rate it? ... difficult to say as I found it a bit of a gimmick and soon got bored with it.

1. Yes, but it's an occasional lens, I had a 16mm Sigma fisheye that I used for film and enjoyed it.

2. Samyang 8mm CS Fisheye, lovely build, great optics, manual focus. Some sample test images here:

https://www.pentaxuser.com/forum/topic/samyang-8mm-fe-torture-test-21179

Full test here (on C***n):

http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/526-samyang8f35eos

John

i love it

The Samyang 8mm seems well thought of, but if I was after something wider than 18mm I'd probably go for their 14mm instead. It's full frame compatible so would double as a fisheye on film as well as an ultra wide angle on digital. Most of my subjects involve some straight lines, and I just find the distortion painful with a fisheye.

Edit, as I realise the above makes little sense! I mean that I could use it on film to satisfy my curiosity about fisheye lenses then keep it on digital as an ultrawide.

mine gets used at every wedding..... two types of shot....
groups at tables, and flower toss/garter toss...
you learn to do those shots well, and the lens is indispensable.

it is a hard lens to use well.... but worth learning.

Not really as it's rectilinear, you would end up with an ultra wide angle lens.

John

Even better then!

I'd previously thought that a fisheye was simply a very wide angle lens, with the distortion an inevitable side effect of trying to squeeze that field of view onto a relatively small frame/sensor? Obviously this isn't strictly true!

Pentax 10-17 at 10mm