A Very Small Fish Indeed - With Olympus

This post will appeal to those photographers who have done with the boring old representation of reality. Because the fish-eye lens is one of the easiest ways to depart from this.

Now, if you are a fish, you can dispute this. When we couple a short focal length lens to a digital camera and allow it to see widely with noticeable curvature on the margins of the image - it appears perfectly natural to a herring. Halibut find no inconsistency. Tuna are bored, but then tuna never really respond to the visual arts. They are more into music - particularly keyboard music. We have all heard of a piano tuna...

Moving right along...if you are a micro 4/3 user this is your opportunity to do something fishy. The Olympus people make a wonderful little 9mm f:8 fisheye lens that clips intot he front of any of their micro 4/3 mirrorless cameras - and indeed into those of the Panasonic people as well - and acts as both a body cap and a fast fish eye.

You get to do a little bit of focussing, but really that is gilding the goldfish - this lens has such a depth of field that you can more-or-less just leave it at the middle click stop and never bother to change. It is super light.

Results? Well the header is just out front of the shop in Stirling Street in yesterday's heat. Pretty good for a case of poke the camera out the door and press the button then pull the arm back inside.

And if you have a program on your computer that deals with camera distortions - this Macbook Pro is using Photoshop Elements 10 - you can make the new Pagoda Format pictures. Also known as the Framer's Nightmare.