Recently, my mate John has acquired a stash of old camera gear including a Nikon F2, an Asahi Pentax, a Mamiya Press 6×9 and a Konica T3. He’s been getting bored with conventional digital photography and has developed great enthusiasm in shaking the dust off the mechanisms of these antiquities.
The T3 has a Kenko fisheye lens that screws into the front of the Hexanon 40mm f/1.8 lens. We decided to take it for a walk through the streets of Melbourne. Attached to the 40mm lens, the 180 degree angle of view creates a circular image on film, covering the metering needle seen through the viewfinder. We had a handheld meter to combat this.
We shot with the 40mm Hexanon lens wide open and used the aperture scale on the fisheye lens with f/5.6 being as wide as we could get at this focal length.The negative film used was extremely expired Fuji Superia Xtra 800. Shown below are some of the funky shots I managed.
Cool results Cain – looks to be a bit of fun !
Also your previous post in Kinabulu seems to have a scripting error of some sort….
cheers,
tone :)
Tony: Yeah, the results were surprising given my lack of faith in the film and our bodgo metering. John got some 120 size Kodak 400 NC for the Mamiya Press which shall be even more interesting for us. Thanks for the note on the script error. It didn’t show up in firefox but in IE. I went and deleted what I could and reformatted.
yummy, 100% fisheye is much better than on my cropped camera using a peleng.
What are your thoughts on the fish? I found it hard to get used to at first and still dont use it as much as I would like to.
Jason: I’ve seen some Peleng shots floating around the web – do you have any online? I assume the Peleng covers 180 degrees corner to corner on a full 35mm frame. You think it would be any better that way? The fish was fun but not something I would consider using very much. To make scenes really dynamic you have to get really close – it’s really only inanimate subjects that can tolerate it. Apparently this Kenko fish can focus as close as 10mm. As you can see it was really soft on the edges. Also, using the 40mm lens as a mount gave an image on the film that was far too small.
photos online with the peleng…hmm, let me see…not really any! ha! The one ‘bradshaw hits europe’ was cropped from a peleng shot.
I totally agree about getting really close. I’ve seen it well used for action/sports photography involving skateboards/bmx’s etc. Also some architectural stuff with hugin plugger and all that mumbo jumbo, though that doesn’t really fancy me. I tried some shots around a corner at that cycling crit but my flash was too powerful so they all turned out shit!
8mm close! Would be interesting to do some landscape marco stuff with it maybe, though it wouldn’t be very cost friendly for your film costs i’m sure!
Jason: i’d be interested to see some macro fisheye shots. don’t think i’ve seen anything like it before. if using extension tubes, they’d probably lose the effect though? the unwrap hugin function doesn’t really interest me either – sort of defeats the purpose of using it in the first place, then produces a weird distribution of resolution. so i think i’ve come to the conclusion it’s a bitch to use.
as for saving on film – i recently watched ‘lost in la mancha’ and saw the bungled effort of Terry Gilliam try to make a Don Quixote film. i didn’t realise he directed ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ which was basically shot through a fish. i might have to rewatch it to pick up some angles…
hey thanks for visiting my blog. my house was fine, not overly close to the fires. i can’t believe the fires are still raging on. the route i take to work got burnt & every time i pass it i feel a shiver go down my spine.
it’s tragic
fish is awesome my d90 has a fish eye funation, although i don’t totally understand how to use it (lol)
these are outstandingly sharp :)
kudos for melbourne
chloë: tragic indeed – i do a bit of mountain biking at lysterfield and even that small park has not been left alone. like i said to Jason, have you seen ‘fear and loathing….” yet? there are some mad fish angles in that film. i saw your post on the fisheye function (it comes up one of the first after a google search on D90+fisheye+function). seems like a neat in-built tool. being software based it lacks that full-whacky-180-perspective you get with a minimal focal length lens. if only i could get my hands on one for my canon…