Happy Fisheye Days Are Here Again

As you all probably know, I am absolutely crazy for anything excessively wide angle, both in photography and computer graphics. In '97, I bought myself a Nikon SLR Body for the sole reason to stick this manual focus/aperture full frame fisheye lens on there. I then proceeded the next five years to capture all my holidays and everything else in fisheye glory (some examples of that still on here). Life was good.

But then digital photography happened, developing rolls of film became uncool, and my beloved fisheye started gathering dust. I bridged the gap with many pocket digitals, and resorted to my crazy floorplan compositions and recently, stitched panoramic photos, to satisfy my wide angle love. I shot my entire world trip with a really crappy compact camera, and besides the fun panoramas, I began to get very frustrated about the terrible lighting quality compared to my old Nikon.

This couldn't last forever. One reason I never made the plunge to digital fisheye, is that digital SLRs have smaller sensors than 35mm film, reducing all very wide fisheye lenses to "kinda wide", which is boring. But recently I have been doing a lot of research, and found a lens that is so crazy wide it will be wider than my old fisheye, even on a modern DSLR.

So, after 12 year, I am back to distort the world with fisheye, better than ever. I present to you, the deadly combo of a Nikon D90 and a Sigma 8mm f/3.5 lens. Funnily enough, for all the progress that has happened in the last 12 years, the D90 is surprisingly similar to my old F70 body, takes the same lenses, etc. But it takes (fisheye) video! and has all sorts of neat digital tools, of course.

The lens is wider than my old fisheye, to the point that it shows the edges of the lens horizontally (see first picture). This would have made it useless in the film days, but nowadays it is actually good, since I intend to transform and crop each picture on the computer anyway (this lens has no zoom :). The idea is to simply take in all the information, and then later decide what part you will use, and wether you want it to look more or less fisheye-y. See second picture for an example what it will look like once on the computer, using my patented "semi-stereographic" transformation (which looks nicer than pure fisheye, I think).

As for cropping, my old fisheye would always be a 3:2 ratio picture. With this one, I can choose to have 1:1, 2:1, or whatever cool ratio, while getting more angle than the old lens. I can take those panoramas I took on my world trip in a single shot now.

Me & Iara are off to Utah for the break, so good time to test this camera out :)

On a less fun note, some soccermum yesterday wasn't paying attention and rammed her SUV straight into my shiney new car. Sigh, Dallas never changes. Oh well, gain some, lose some.