Also known as ‘whole sky lenses’, they could be trained on the sky for 180° panoramic sky monitoring shots. When fisheye lenses were first developed in the 1920s, it was for meteorological purposes, and this circular effect was exactly what they were looking for. However, from 8mm down, vignetting closes in at the edges and your scene becomes enclosed in a circle. From 15mm down to 8mm on a full-frame camera, you get an increasingly wide angle of view (and increasing distortion to match) in an image that fills the entire frame – known as ‘full frame fisheye’. As a wide-angle lens is rectilinear, if you were to shoot the same scene at 12mm on a fisheye, and then 12mm on a wide-angle, you would see considerably more of your scene with the fisheye. The effect is more pronounced the wider you shoot. This is known as barrel distortion and results in curved lines around the periphery of your photo. A fisheye, however, is a curvilinear lens because it gives you a hemispherical view of the world – the distorted view a fish sees. This is the category most lenses fall into, including wide-angle. A rectilinear lens captures straight lines as straight lines, reproducing what the eye sees. In photography there are basically two types of lenses – rectilinear and curvilinear. Work with that distortion and you can create something very special. However, thanks to the way a fisheye curves lines at the periphery, used in the right way it can help you shoot images with a unique twist on common views.
Because of the unusual images they create, fisheyes are often unfairly dismissed as special effects lenses.
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