Another test subject

Defish! Defish!

I put up fierce opposition, but my arguments were ultimately convincing. I wore myself down and persuaded myself to get a Rokinon 8mm f3.5 fisheye in Nikon mount. (The Rokinon is sold under many names and is made by Samyang in Korea.) One of the arguments I used in talking myself into it was that through software correction it would be possible to turn the lens from an overused stunt optic into a …  (read more)

12 Jul 2013

152 visits

Another test subject

Same scene, from ground level.

12 Jul 2013

184 visits

Again, correction helps . . .

. . . but is imperfect. And there is some cropping. I'd rather it produce a pincushion-shaped image with straight lines, and leave the cropping, if any, to me. Oh, well. More to learn.

12 Jul 2013

196 visits

Innovation Center lobby from above

This looked like something that would be good for testing whether I could "defish" a picture in the GIMP. This is the original.

12 Jul 2013

152 visits

First try

Went to the GIMP Filters > Distorts > Lens distortion and put in these values: Main -100 Edge= 50 Zoom=-20, which I found online. This is the result.

12 Jul 2013

182 visits

Then did it again

Using the settings in the previous picture, I ran the distortion filter again. Here's the result. Usable but not great. Clearly I have more to learn about the process!

12 Jul 2013

2 favorites

251 visits

The tree of many trunks

This sycamore had lost its main trunk, but runners all around the stump grew tall and lush. I photographed this tree with a 12mm lens, with the result here: www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/22331765 But it took a fisheye (the 8mm Rokinon for those keeping score) to really show it off. This is an uncorrected out-of-camera JPEG.

12 Jul 2013

179 visits

One good thing about the Rokinon . . .

. . . is that it doesn't distort for distortion's sake, the way some fisheye lenses do. If the horizon is centered and there are no obvious straight lines in a large picture element, it doesn't look fisheye-ish at all, as exemplified by this picture, which is straight out of the camera with no correction. No one has put this phenomenon to better use than Glen at Focus on Newfoundland, some of whose pictures are here: www.ipernity.com/home/newfoundland .

15 Jul 2013

2 comments

240 visits

Peculiarity

I have no idea how this came about. It was sitting on my hard drive this morning; my guess is that it is the result of one of my attempts to correct for the fisheye effect. But I thought it was kind of cool, so here it is.