Monday, July 28, 2014

Whimsical Fun with a Fisheye Lens


Fisheye lenses aren't for every occasion, but they are certainly a good idea  in certain instances like this one where I wanted to get everything (house, deck and pool) in the photo.  You can even see my shadow in the pool since I got up on top of the slide to take the picture (:g).


I like the way that the fisheye bends the trees in a whimsical fashion.  Hey, if you are looking for an arbor of trees without any luck you can always take along a fisheye and create one!


Fisheyes are great for panorama photos.  Here I wanted to get the old historical building, the beautiful palm trees and a hint of the modern building next door.


In this case I think that the fisheye effect gave the photo of this Mexican restaurant a more tropical feel as the deck and its tiki like umbrellas wrap around the building.


In this fisheye photo of my kitchen I added a white vignette to enhance the effect. My fisheye lens is an 8mm Rokinon (all manual...no auto settings).  I keep the lens set at Infinity and f5.6.  This is a Nikon mount lens.  I used it for these photos on my Nikon D300 camera.  The Rokinon lens is really built strong. It looks great, and the optics are terrific but it costs a pittance of what it's Nikon competitor sells for. Rokinon offers fisheye lenses for other camera bodies as well.  I added one to my wishlist for my Olympus EM-5 too.

 A fisheye is a great lens when you want to give your photography a creative charge.  I like to put mine on the camera,then I leave all of my other lenses in the bag at home and just spend a few hours seeing what I can create with the fisheye. What do you think?

Friday, July 18, 2014

New Mousepad from a favorite photo.

I just had a mousepad made up by Shutterfly from a photograph that I took of the interior of my convertible. I am thrilled with it and thought that I would share it. The photo was taken with my compact Panasonic DMC LF-1. I mounted the camera on an X-Shot Extender pole and used a 10 second delay to take the photo. 


Saturday, July 12, 2014

First Look - New Olympus 60mm f3.8 Macro Lens


 My new 60mm (120mm) f2.8 Olympus Macro lens just arrived.  I am sharing a few handheld photos that I took around the house with the lens on my EM-5...all at f2.8.  I have not touched these photos except for cropping.  I was particularly interested in the bokeh that I would get.  Pretty good I think 






I can't wait to get this baby on a tripod and get some photos of flowers.  What do you think?