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Did something crazy today. I was at the friendly neighbourhood Camera store with my 10D looking for a UV filter for my EF16-35, and guess what?
I saw a Canon EF 15mm F2.8 Fisheye on the shelves, asked to see it, fixed it on my 10D, played with it, loved it, and forked out the equivalent of US$735 to buy it. Purely a naughty on the spur of the moment, impulse purchase. Took it home, and I'm still playing with it, and am mighty pleased with myself
However, I hope tommorow morning I will not kick myself in the butt for doing it. Up till now, I'm still thinking its a unique piece of glass for the lens collection. One fell swoop and I've got myself the widest but one lens in the EF range which should help a bit to counteract the 1.6 times focal length multiplier.
Has anybody got one of these "toys" and can you please tell me your experiences with it.
I've just downloaded and installed Helmut Dersch's free Panorama Tools which according to the Canon forum at Fred Miranda's, is an excellent program which can be used to generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images, besides correction of images to remove all sorts of barrel and/or pincussion distortion.
Panorama Tools can also Remap from any projection to any projection, warp and unwarp normal, panoramic and fisheye images, simulate a shift lens in software, generate full panoramic view using any mixture of normal, fisheye and panoramic images, extract any view (normal/fisheye/panoramic) from any panorama (RealVR/QTVR/rectilinear), and insert any image (normal/fisheye/panoramic) into any panorama (RealVR/QTVR/rectilinear). It is also supposed to be a very powerful Realtime Panorama editor.
Although I've installed it, I haven't tried it yet. And when I am comfortable with it, I'll try and post a review.
You can download it from here:
http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch
The EF 15 Fisheye is a full-frame fisheye. Like the circular fisheye lens, its coverage is 180 degrees, but instead of producing a circular image with 180 degree coverage in every direction, it produces a full-frame image with 180 degrees coverage on the diagonal. Although there is quite noticeable barrel distortion, I find even with Photoshop's transformation tools I can easily correct this without any very noticeable image quality degradation.
Take a look at these links for some write-ups about realigning images shot with the Rectangular Fisheye:
http://luminous-landscape.com/reviews/imagealign.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/acapixus/p...y/panotools.htm
I've posted this picture before, but it is an example of one of my early shots with the Canon EF Fisheye. As I've said elsewhere, the Barrel effect is intentional and very easy to remove/correct with PS or Panorama Tools. I left it in as I feel the barrelling effect is what (in my humble opinion) makes this shot "different" from the countless thousands shot by tourists of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Tallest, TWIN Towers in the world. That Tower in Taipei which now claims to be the world's tallest, is a single Tower, I believe.
And here is an example of the extreme depth of field that is possible with the Fisheye. This early picture with my new Fisheye lens was shot at dawn outside our hotel, 6000 ft up in the mountains of Nuwara Eliya in Sri Lanka. The nearest flowers were about 20 inches from the Canon 15mm fisheye lens, which was pointed slightly downwards to also include the distant mountains.
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