Fisheye photography

[YD KM]

Hi I'm a Canon user and looking into fisheye photography. Just hoping the masters here can give me some opinions whether manual focus lens is enuff or need auto focus lens for fisheye lens.

 

[Kit]

Do you prefer to drive a car with automatic or manual transmission? This is the same kind of question you are asking. Question which nobody can answer better than yourself. Have you been using manual or auto focus lenses? What are you considering between manual and auto focus? Price? Convenience? Speed? What do you take?

 

[YD KM]

Problem is I never use manual lens before. So v hard for me to judge. Anyway thanks for ur advise Kit. U give me the idea to use manual focus using my existing lens to try out before I decide further. Thanks a lot.

 

[catchlights]

What you intent to shoot?
What is your ususal output?
Are you shooting with tripod always?

 

[Kit]

Problem is I never use manual lens before. So v hard for me to judge. Anyway thanks for ur advise Kit. U give me the idea to use manual focus using my existing lens to try out before I decide further. Thanks a lot.

If your existing lenses don't comes with a distance scale, it will not be able to replicate the way you focus with manual lenses. If you are really interested in manual lenses, I'd suggest you read up on zone focussing and hyper distance focussing. They are not difficult to work with if your lens has a proper distance scale.

 

[YD KM]

@catchlights, I wanna use fisheye to capture landscapes n buildings. Not intent to use tripod. So duno if manual focus is enuff or need auto focus.

@Kit, thanks once again for the enlightenment. Will go n check it out!

 

[tomcat]

@catchlights, I wanna use fisheye to capture landscapes n buildings. Not intent to use tripod. So duno if manual focus is enuff or need auto focus.

@Kit, thanks once again for the enlightenment. Will go n check it out!

Fisheye lenses being ultra-wide angle lenses tend to be very close focusing. It would be convenient to have autofocus but AF fisheye lenses tend to be much more expensive compared to manual focus ones. For landscape and buildings, it is probably OK to use manual focus fisheye lenses as long as there are no objects in the foreground of the image that might not be within the depth of field. Just set to a small aperture eg f/8 to ensure adequate depth of field to cover everything you want in focus and shoot away. Properly set up, most of the time you might not need to adjust focus any more but you could do some manual adjustments to ensure that a particular subject in the frame is in sharp focus if you so desire and have the time to do so.

 

[shierwin]

For Fish-eye lens, look at the distance scale. There's very little you can do on the distance scale. The ring excursion is very small. Just set the aperture to f/6- f/11, distance agar2 and fire away like a point and shoot!

 

[YD KM]

Just got myself a Panasonic Lumix 8mm f3.5 fisheye lens. Shiok to the max!!

 

[XavierShoot]

I got this Samyang 8mm fisheye, and its manual. however i just left it on f8, focus to infinity. and all my pictures are sharp~! and everything in focus.