Our friend Axel is also photo crazy and Canon user so we quickly homed in on each other. This guy has got crazy lenses and I did not yet find a single one that I also have! Josie has been out with the EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM while I took the smallest one which is a 15mm fisheye lens. I have always been a fan of wide angle and Canon has the EF 8-15mm f4.0L fisheye zoom lens which is the wildest fisheye on the market today.
But would I like it and use it? Would it be handy to have both aboard and around the boat? I decided to put the Canon EF 15mm f2.8 fisheye on the Canon 5D Mark II and give it a spin around the marina. Here's the first shot (you can click on them to jump to full size versions on our SmugMug site):
This is m/v Bella and I was actually taking a picture of their young little dog which comes out whenever we walk by but quickly hides when he sees the camera pointed at him (wise dog). He is hiding on a step of the staircase leading up and I can't see him here so that proves that fisheye lenses can't see around corners :-) But look to the right... I actually have all the stern in this shot... now to the left... just not the bow but a half step back and I would have gotten the full boat in the shot from... 2 foot distance! Yes, this is wide alright...
Next shot:
Laundry day aboard Venus :) Look at the pretty blue skies (eat your hearts out if you're somewhere cold...) and all those colors and the distortion around the edges of this shot: pure fun! I point almost straight ahead down a finger pier but yet on the left side you see the main dock which is at 90 degrees. In the upper right corner I barely managed to keep the sun out of the shot which became the biggest problem with this lens. On to the next shot:
Here's one of the few wind generators that are Jedi approved: the D-400. This "looking-up" shot shows that distortion in the center of the photo is minimal, with the wind generator and the pole it is on looking pretty straight. But as we look further right the masts become curlier. They almost touch the top of that lone mast sticking up on the left side of the image!
Here's Frank the dock master and base guitar player :) I'm about 4 inches from his nose and I hope I didn't scare y'all! If you think you can handle these shots then sit tight for the next one:
That's the manager... check the glasses, it's really John. When I showed this picture on the camera LCD everybody started running away from me so it was me and dead things again:
I should come back for that shot when the sun is a bit further away. This shot is straight up but yet there's masts from boats sticking into the frame from the side. Does that really bother me? Nope :) Hey, there's people in the yard not running away:
Here's Heidi on VonnieT getting a paint job.... and the boat too. See how much fun this lens is :) VonnieT is a heavy displacement boat... the stands are under lots of tension!
I had played a bit with this lens before and did a shot peeking inside the mini-super. It turned out bad because of the shutter time being long even though I had the camera on auto-ISO to prevent just that. I think that the evaluative metering that I am using isn't the best setting for this lens so I have it on manual ISO now and bring it up to 1600 to get more room to play with in this second attempt:
That's much better, even at f11 aperture, I get 1/80s which is fine as I'm leaning against the door post to get the whole shop in the shot! This is nice, let's try the dark restaurant:
And there's the dreaded sun in the windows blowing out the shot a bit. I'm down to f/4 at 1/200s here, still at ISO 1600. Hmm, familiar face there at the left... somebody is frikkin' following me from the shop... who is running it now, hey they sell cold drinks here, okay, let's get out of here back into the sun before I give in! Well, it's become too hot really so I decide to just hop along friends aboard catamaran Sea of Time who are still on the hard, working in this heat. They have the boat name on the hull and when I almost touch the letters with the camera, I can still get the complete name in the frame:
It almost looks like it's the bow instead of the side of the hull but it's still pretty neat I think. See how shiny that hull is? That's because it got a polymer sealer coating on the gel coat just like Jedi got during our haul out last year. The stuff is called RejeX and we pay about $130.- for a gallon which is enough for 2 coats on a 45' boat.
Back to this lens. I'm a nerd who wants everything straight when it's supposed to be straight so I had thought fisheye lenses were not my thing and I was happy shooting my EF 17-40mm f4.0L normal wide angle. But even I don't mind the distortion of a fisheye lens at all and enjoy it a lot. I think I'm gonna have to buy that 8-15L glass after all!
And there's more: I had thought that with software like Adobe Lightroom, you can straighten the images from fisheye lenses again so they become normal wide angle. I tried that and they do (well, not the shot of John but that's asking too much of the technology probably) but you also lose a lot of angle when it gets cropped straight again so it makes no sense to do that... except when you have no regular wide angle lens.
When you buy the Canon L-class lenses, the costs of adding lenses quickly adds up and the EF 8-15mm f4.0L zoom is no exception at around $1,500.- The 15mm used for the pictures above is no L-class lens but still costs more than $600.- so you have to decide carefully where to spend the budget on. For regular wide angle there is also the GoPro camera with all it's options for mounting on railings or even taking up in the sky with a kite from aboard your boat under sail! If you are not into landscape photography, you could probably do without a wide angle like the EF 17-40mm f4.0L which would give an opening to getting the fisheye zoom instead. If you like all aspects of photography like I do, you just have to spread it out and start with the most important lenses: standard zoom and a fast 70-200mm f2.8 telezoom. Next add extenders for that telezoom. After that it is wide angle, macro and only then a lens like a fish eye makes sense. And that is because the Canon 100mm f2.8L macro can double as a portrait lens!
Now, if you also shoot video, this all changes again... because the 8-15mm f4.0L fish eye is also great for video, check out the examples on YouTube!
ciao!
Nick.
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