ljplicease | When I go crazy with the fisheye

I have always been a little skeptical of the humble fisheye lens. There are some great photographs taken with them, but I feel a little bit like the appeal to this type of lens is the crazy distortion and the subjects get lost. At the same time, being a photo gear geek I've also wanted to try one out. I've had a couple of cheap plastic ones (both Lomography branded), and took some interesting with them, but they were a bit awkward to use, so they were underutilized. For a while I had been eyeing a third party fisheye for my Nikon SLRs that was on the cheaper side for a while. Just recently I coincidentally got a bunch of Amazon gift cards such that I could by the lens for free! Which was the right price :)

I took a lot of photographs with it. Mostly film but some digital. It was pretty fun to play with some new tech, and I am glad that I got it, but I think my initial skepticism was correct. It is far too tempting to get distracted by the crazy distortion that you forget about the things that you are photographing. One place I think the fisheye does well is in enclosed spaces where you otherwise miss what is going on in a room. Like the photographs above, you get a feel for the room, where even a super wide angle taken from one corner would seem too narrowly focused.

In non photo geek news I spent most of the day working and practicing my talk for tomorrow. When I first started working on the talk I created some slides thinking that would help me figure out what I wanted to say. As a result the talk was somewhat fragmented. This morning I had the idea to write down the things that I wanted to say without looking at the slides and then create the slides from the words. I ended up using some of the original slides in the end which is good because I spent a fair amount of time on them, but I think the talk is more cohesive and sensible now.