Minolta MC 16mm 2,8 fisheye

lumens pixel · Expire: 2021-06-25

This is a lens I am "afraid" of. I never felt at ease with ultra wides, even more with fisheyes.

I bought this lens many years ago. I was impressed with its quality, both in terms of manufacturing and image quality. However it spent most of its time stored and almost forgotten.

For unexplained reason I decided to took it for a spin yesterday for a walk at the park. I used it first for general landscape pictures but found that uninteresting. I tried some pics at close distance.

To my eyes focusing under 50 cm would degrade a little bit image quality. However around 0,7 to 1 meter image quality is quite good.

If you don't look for obvious fisheye effect you would need to watch for framing, avoiding tilting much the lens up or down or to locate verticals close to the borders of the frame.

What about your experiences with fisheyes?

Massif | Flower bled by lumens pixel, sur Flickr

RokkorDoctor · Expire: 2025-05-01

I also use the Rokkor MC/MD 16mm/2.8.

In "nature" shots devoid of man-made straight lines I tend to find fish-eyes to render a more natural look than linear extreme wide-angles. Given the significant shift in centre of perspective under the typical print/screen viewing distance of wide-angle shots, fish-eyes tend to preserve the angular geometry in the corners better than linear wide-angle lenses do. But if you observe the print/screen from a very short distance so the angle of view corresponds to the one when the shot was taken, then linear wide-angles look more natural.
Hence IMO a lot depends on the shift in centre of perspective under the anticipated viewing conditions of the final print as to which type of lens will work best (linear extreme wide-angle vs fisheye).

Fish-eye lenses can be very useful for taking single-shot panoramic shots, if you keep the "horizon" level and exactly in the middle of the frame. Combined with de-fishing software like FishEye-Hemi (no longer available I believe), one can do interesting things:

Bath, with Minolta MD FISHEYE ROKKOR 16mm/2.8 + FishEye-Hemi PP & vertical centre crop:

Minolta MD FISH-EYE ROKKOR 16mm f/2.8 on SONY A7S, hand-held at 1/30s at ISO 400, and processed through Fisheye-Hemi (Bath Cathedral)