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What Is a Fisheye Lens?
Kamera Express
Create a magical world with a fisheye lens
Photographing with the effect of a funhouse mirror, a world in which everything straight becomes curved and perspective is pulled completely out of proportion. This is the effect of a fisheye lens. Creative, a gimmick, or can you work with it professionally? And when you choose a fisheye lens, what should you pay attention to? In this article, you can read more about it.
What is a fisheye lens?
Photos taken with a fisheye lens stand out immediately. The image shows an alienating world, in which everything close by appears enormously large and everything further away appears tiny in the photo.
The angle of view of a fisheye lens is wide, with up to 180° vision. So pay close attention to what can be seen in the image because of this enormous angle. The huge angle of view also creates the curved lines in the image field. This allows you to create images with strong distortion, but this angle of view can also ensure that you can capture certain architecture or landscapes in a single photo.
With lenses that have an angle of view of 180° or more, it is even possible to capture the entire celestial dome in a single photo.
When do I buy a fisheye lens?
The type of lens you buy depends on the artistic choices you make as a photographer. A fisheye lens gives you unique possibilities for creating creative images. When photographing a portrait, for example, you can choose to capture your subject from above. The fisheye lens makes the head large and the body small, creating an alienating effect.
Another way to capture special images is by combining buildings that already have curved lines with the straight lines of surrounding buildings. When you want to capture a very wide composition in one image, a fisheye lens can offer the solution, as it allows you to work with a wider angle of view than a standard wide-angle lens.
Buying a fisheye lens; what should I pay attention to?
There are two different types of fisheye lenses: circular and diagonal. With the circular design, the lens is able to project 180° images as a circle in the camera frame. The subjects are distorted and surrounded by a black surface. This is the typical, well-known fisheye look.
With diagonal fisheye lenses, the full image area is used to display the projection. As a result, even more pixels are used, resulting in less spherical distortion in the photo. This type of fisheye lens is effective for capturing cityscapes, building interiors and performances in concert halls.
"A fisheye lens is an ultra-wide-angle lens with a short focal length; the distortions are created by the wide angle of view."
Advantages and disadvantages at a glance
Advantage
One advantage of the perspective of a fisheye lens is that the distortions actually create the effect that gives images a warmer overall feel. A fisheye lens is ideal in a situation where a large area needs to be captured. This is due to the lens’s wide angle of view. The enormous angle of view and the light intensity make the fisheye ideal for astrophotography
Disadvantage
Although the images look strange, the fisheye lens corresponds to the perspective from the lens of the human eye. The only difference is that our field of view is limited to an angle of around 45°, which means the reduced image of a fisheye lens does not feel realistic. A fisheye lens is also not suitable for serious portraits because of the distortions.
