10.5mm Fisheye tips and results

I've had my 10.5mm Fisheye since November, but have only really started using it frequently in the last few days in Grand Cayman. I thought wetpixellites might like to hear about how I've got on.

The first tip I have is that all that pretty gold embossed lettering on top of the lens can (at certain angles) cause internal reflections on the inside of the dome and ruin shots. So I have covered all the pretty gold with black tape to avoid this risk:

I am sorry for attaching all these images, but I cannot upload them to my own space from here. Also this shots are just quick batch converts on my laptop and the colours are not all spot on!

I had hoped that the increased coverage of the 10.5mm would help control sunbursts. Although, obviously, the lens would do nothing for the dynamic range of the chip, I thought that maybe sunbursts would be captured better because, simply, they will be smaller in the frame.

I still think the camera is poor in this respect (compared with film). I took this picture this morning and I find the sun and the wide strip of cyan around it pretty unsightly. I did take plenty of shots without the sun in, while I had the 10.5mm stuffed up this hawksbill's nose. If I had been shooting on film I would have tried to get the sun right behind the turtle, while on digi I prefer to be more level with the subject and just get blue water as a background.

The filter holder on the back of the lens is excellent for available light filter shots and cutting the filter (square vs circular) and slipping it in the slot is so much easier than on the 16mm FE.

I've only done 1 available light dive so far. But the 10.5mm is very good for this type of photography. It is important to keep a slightly downward camera angle - otherwise, if you include the surface closer to the camera it will be too red because the lightpath is shorter - see the thread on available light filter photog for more details on this (under techniques and tips).

This shot was taken at Stingray City 3-4m deep and I used a 40CC red gel and white balanced using a grey card (no flash).

What I really like about the 10.5mm is finally being able to shoot something really wide on digital. I've always been a big fan of the 16mm on film and have felt my style of photography has been limited by not having something really wide on digital. I've been very impressed by the optical quality of the 10.5mm (though you can't see it here in these jpgs).

This shot demonstrates what the 10.5mm can do, that no other lens can manage on a cropped sensor DSLR. It may not be the greatest shot ever, but being able to light and person, while they remain small in the frame is just not possible without a really wide lens. This shot, which is part of a story I have been working out here (with the writer I was travelling with), is intended to have lots of negative space for editorial usage.

This is my final post for now. I'll add some more when I have tried some split levels and a few other types of shots.

Lighting the 10.5mm shots is tough without big wide strobes. Like with the 16mm fisheye - in most shots we do not try to light the whole image. Instead we just light the main subject and don't worry about lighting the open water in the rest of the image. e.g. the turtle shot.

A good test of lighting is in caves where the whole image must be lit with your strobes. I use two subtronic alphas. I think getting lighting right around an image it is essential to use two strobes which need to be carefully aimed. This attempt still needs some work!

Alex, the shot at Stingray city is amazing, yet another testament to filters and available light photography!

I really like the second shot. I'll be in Grand Cayman on the 29th and I have my filters already cut.

Are you using the lens on AF or did you get a focus gear for it. With my 16 I just used to pre-focus the lens at 1.25ft and everything was in focus. What are you doing with the 10.5.

Larry

Alex,

Your shots are amazing. Particularly the natural light shots.

Can you help me by explaining more about your filter use? What kind of filter exactly are you using? Is this one specific to underwater use like the UR pro filters or is this a standard Coklin/promaster filter, or is this one of the card type sheets of plastic? Is this what is meant by a "gel"?

How are you attaching the filter? Is thos on the outside or inside of the housing? If it is on the inside, what is your technique? Shooting all natural light for an entire dive or even day? Is there any way to mount a filter outside of a dome port? (Probably not but it would be great if you could.)

Finally, with setting the WB manually, does this imply that you are shooting in jpg mode? Does custom white ballance have an effect in RAW (NEF) ?

As you can guess I'm fairly new to filters and the article on this site was a bit over my head not having actually seen any of the UR pro filters. But I'd like to be able to get some of the panoramics like yours where it would not be possible to light the scene with a strobe.

Thanks

Oh also, what sort of processing did you do on these shots? Did they look anywhere near this good out of the camera?

Thanks for the feedback. I'm too lazy to manually focus any lens - so I use the 10.5mm (and for that matter all my lenses) on AF-C. I forgot to mention that I am shooting it behind a Subal FE2 Dome port.

I'll answer the filter related questions in private messages (as I want to keep this thread related to the 10.5mm). All these images are pretty much straight from the camera - I don't tend to mess about with them in the field. White balance for normal (non-filter lighting) I shoot on auto or sunlight and usually output from ACR at 4100 to 4500K with tint -5 to +5 and usually boost saturation a little. To create these 400 pixel jpgs I just resize, auto-contrast, sharpen and save for web.

Alex

This image shows how I fit a filter to the rear of the 10.5mm lens. Obviously, I cannot then change from filter photography during the dive.

Alex

Alex, have these images been corrected for distortion?

Photoshop?Panotools?Capture?

Karl

hi alex, your shots are great

Hightlights are THE problem for me of the DSLR

so Ive tried with the 10,5 mm to shot with the sun in the frame, it has only been possible with a very small aperture at 1/125 to have correct results, or Ill have know to shoot in the blue but without the sun inside

Maybe for the next generation of DSLR .......

Where can you find these kind of filters ?

this picture was taken this week end , in a lake

fuji s2 18/35 nikon

SB 104 and 105

F22 at 1/125

l ll try this this week in egypt

(thanks James for the tip )

Craig has reported that his sunbursts are improved when he's using a gel filter.

Cheers

James

I do think that the 10.5mm makes it easier to shoot sunbursts than other lenses, but I still also think that it falls short of what film can achieve.

Here is an example I shot this am. Same gorgonian. Left shot with sun behind me was taken on 1/90th @ f9.5 (strobes on 1/4 power) and the right shot is taken into the sun at 1/250th @ f19 (strobes on full top, and 1/2 power bottom). In the right shot the sun is small - and doesn't ruin the shot, but it also doesn't really add to the shot in the way that all the subtle hues of a sunburst would on film.

These shots are straight from the camera - with no manipulation in Photoshop apart from resize and sharpen. No distortion correction - once you are used to a fisheye it is easy to hide the distortion (expect on wrecks with straight edges).

The common advice to get sunbursts on digital is to underexpose and then underexpose further the background. This keeps the size of the sunball small and also faster shutter speeds tend to freeze the rays making them more distinct. For this shot I exceeded the synch speed of my camera and shot at 1/250th (you will notice that I composed so that you don't see that the right of the frame is not lit by the flash). So I do not think I could underexpose the background much more than this.

Alex

I should add that sunbursts are also affected by environmental conditions - and flat seas and no wind really help produce better rays of light. This morning I did not have those conditions!

I'm going to contradict myself now! I took this shot in 2000, in very similar conditions to today. This is a scanned slide and I think that the sunburst in this shot is no better than in the digital shot (above). Of courses this is partly the photographer's fault and we have all failed to catch the sun burst as well as we could have. But it makes the point that we also need the right environmental conditions to get our sunbursts.

So actually I am going to backdown a bit about the 10.5mm and sunbursts and wait until I have the ideal conditions. So, reconsidering my opinion a bit, I think that the 10.5mm may have the potential to get decent sunbursts so long as we really reduce the amount of ambient light in the shot. And I think that compared with film we have to stop down even further - as we all know digital tends to be less forgiving of over exposure.

Sorry for the shifting opinions, I guess I should think before I write.

Alex

Alex et al...

I'm going to disagree with your contradiction. I think the film handled the sunburst better than the digital. There is a nice roll off of densities to pure white in the film image, while the digital does an abrupt "quantum leap" to pure white. Also, with the film image you were able to expose the background water at a higher value, so the contrast from the blue to white is much less pronounced than in the digital image, where the final image has a much greater contrast range across the image.

Here are two shots I took with a Olympus 3040 in a tetra housing with a WA port on.

Yes I had a strobe but the first shot uses the YS 120 Duo on Full power the second is ambient light.

I think these capture the rays just fine, and if an amature camera such as the 3040 can do it then why not the digital SLR's.

shot at - F8 : 1/125 w/ external full flash

shot at - F10 : 1/500 w/ no flash

I think these photos of mine (which are not by any means the best photos, show it is possible, and I have seen people get great sunbursts with digital, its just a case of working out the formula with your camera.

If the images dont hotlink then the gallery can be found http://www.sendpix.com/albums/04041013/i90jitqqmm/