Nikon 10.5mm F2.8 Fish Eye

[nicoledana]

Im really considering buying this lens for fun. Is it worth the money? Anyone have one that can give me a review?

[Almond.Butterscotch]

I never thought I'd want a fisheye until I used a friend's for about an hour last October*. It only took an hour, but a fisheye's made it's way onto my wishlist (though it'll be a while).

*I was using the 16mm fisheye on a DX body and it was so much fun; the 10.5mm on a DX body must be fantastic.

Nikon 16mm f/2.8 Fisheye - a set on Flickr

[LoveDSLR]

I have the "fun lens" (10.5 DX) and it is a keeper for me. I rather use it with my D300 than consider a 16 f/2.8 D for my D3.

[inkista]

If you're not sure you're going to use it enough to justify that price tag, and you envision only occasional use, you might want to consider a cheaper alternative. The Samyang/Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye goes for about $300 on Amazon. It's a completely manual lens (both aperture and focus are controlled on the lens by rings), but given the immense DoF you get with a fisheye lens, focusing manually is probably not going to be that much of an issue. Like the 10/2.8, it's a diagonal fisheye (i.e., it fills the frame, vs. creating a circular image in the frame) for DX. It's also rebadged as the Vivitar 7mm and the Opteka 6.5mm.

I shoot spherical panos, so my Sigma 8mm f/3.5 circular fisheye NEVER leaves my bag. I love the hell out of it.

[scootermcq]

Originally Posted by inkista

If you're not sure you're going to use it enough to justify that price tag, and you envision only occasional use, you might want to consider a cheaper alternative. The Samyang/Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 fisheye goes for about $300 on Amazon. It's a completely manual lens (both aperture and focus are controlled on the lens by rings), but given the immense DoF you get with a fisheye lens, focusing manually is probably not going to be that much of an issue. Like the 10/2.8, it's a diagonal fisheye (i.e., it fills the frame, vs. creating a circular image in the frame) for DX. It's also rebadged as the Vivitar 7mm and the Opteka 6.5mm.

I shoot spherical panos, so my Sigma 8mm f/3.5 circular fisheye NEVER leaves my bag. I love the hell out of it.

I have this lens, and I don't even touch the manual focus..... except for environmental portraits where you are close to the subject, then you may have to focus on your subject. here are some samples

[OsmosisStudios]

A friend uses it on her D300 as a fun/toy at weddings. Doesnt see much use otherwise.
Another friend has one and, after trying out my 10-24 this summer, is trying to sell it to fund the zoom.

Depends on usage. A lot of people like the fisheye effect. I just like wide, and couldnt live with the CA in the corners.

[phaither]

[QUOTE
I shoot spherical panos, so my Sigma 8mm f/3.5 circular fisheye NEVER leaves my bag. I love the hell out of it.[/QUOTE]

WOW! i had no idea what that was so i checked out your flickr. Awesome!!

[inkista]

Thanks! If you want a little more detail on the workflow, I've recently written a mile-high overview.

I've been through something of a workflow upheaval lately, since I finally got around to upgrading my beat-up old MacBook to Snow Leopard. Two of my favorite tools for playing with panos, PTMac and MathmapCocoa, no longer work on Snow Leopard and have no future support path.

I've now jumped to PTGui Pro, and OMG. Soooo much faster to be able to map and preview in the stitcher than doing layers & masks in Photoshop. And no more manual control point defining. I also love the fact that my license will let me download and install PTGui on both OSX and Windows. Just to see what would happen, I threw bracketed shots for a pano at PTGui, and it didn't miss a beat, and gave me my nicely fused pano without any additional input from me (Hugin wasn't nearly as nice about it).


Equirectangular.
Shot with 5dii, Sigma 8mm f/3.5 circular fisheye, small velbon tripod and Nodal Ninja 2.
6 shots around at 60° intervals in portrait orientation, plus zenith and nadir shots,
at ±2EV. Stitched in PTGui. Nadir patching done in PS CS5 with the patch tool.

Interactive version (flash).

As for Mathmap Cocoa ::eyeroll::. I'm now finally getting some usage out of that Ubuntu Studio virtual machine I set up in Parallels. So, I'm running stuff through the Gimp and Mathmap proper, at last, thanks to a very kind soul on Flickr (octo777) who fixed the Quincuncial script so it would run in the current version of Mathmap.


Quincuncial mapping with Drostify option.

Fisheyes aren't just for skateboarding, environmental portraits, or distortion . They can be about coverage, too. If I were using a 10-22 rectilinear lens for this instead of a fisheye, I'd have to shoot at least two rows of images and the zenith and nadir and be stitching together about 20 shots. If I decided to do exposure fusion, that would be 60 shots to stitch.

BTW, if you want to shoot panos with the 10.5mm or the Samyang 8 on a Nikon crop body, it's pretty much the same as my setup for the shot above: with the camera in portrait orientation, 6 shots around at 60° intervals in yaw + a zenith (straight up) and nadir (straight down) shot.

And your no-parallax (aka "nodal") point is here:



The difference between the diagonals and my circular is that I can still cover the sphere with only four shots around and no z/n if I alternatively pitch 15° up and down (i.e., I can handhold to do these, too sometimes). The 6+zn is required for the 10.5. I think you can get away with 4 for the Samyang/Rokinon 8, but don't quote me on that.