The little fish (NX 10mm f/3.5)

Arn wrote:

Hello there. A few more shots, some text into this topic and a few software tips for a change. I've come to see that the lens works pretty darn well for landscape shots too, even though I like fisheyes even more for interiors. This image turned out to be razor sharp. Lightroom corrected easily some purple fringing from the branches against the sky.

10/3.5, Fisheye hemi

That image was also corrected with a program called Fisheye Hemi. Compared to standard rectilinear correction, the Fisheye-hemi uses a different remapping method for fisheye images - it preserves more of the original composition and retains more pixels (crops a lot less from the original), preserves perspective of the original image, but achieves to straighten vertical lines. Hemi doesn't work as well for exterior architectural shots, but works better when photographing people, etc. Fisheye-Hemi plugin can be found here: http://www.imagetrendsinc.com/products/prodpage_hemi.asp

Rectilinear corrections can be done simply with Lightroom (or Photoshop), but also with many other programs like the free PTlens (which can be also be used to remove barrel/pichushion distortion from calibrated lenses, CA, vigneting, etc). PTlens home page: http://epaperpress.com/ptlens

The fish seems to work well for creating panoramas and planetoids. Basically, due to the ultra-wide nature of fish shots, you should be able to achieve the creation of a planetoid with minimum amount of shots compared to other lenses. Not every program supports stitching of fisheye shots into panoramas though - it may be easier to stitch regular wide angle images. Here I really wish that the NX20 and 10/3.5 fish had some kind of proper Manual Focus function. Damn you Samsung! Stop restricting photographers and start implementing all the neccessary features into the cameras. It makes creating panoramas so much easier, when you can preset the focus distance and fire away. This could be available as a "virtual distance scale" in camera, presenting the focus distance in meters (or feet/yards for some folks).

27 shots stitched into a panorama and then turned into a planetoid. NX20+10/3.5

a quick test with 9 shots stitched into a panorama and turned into a planet projection. NX20+10/3.5

Fisheye panorama stitching can be done with many programs, one of which is the free-of-charge Hugin: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/ . To name a few commercial programs that I know of (that support fish and have automatic stitching features): Kolor Autopano: http://www.kolor.com/ and Panorama plus x4: http://www.serif.com/panoramaplus/

As a general reference to what you can do with a fisheye lens, I present the following images from a Canon mount Sigma 10/2.8 fish:

Note the undistorted (though slightly annoyed) person (yeah, who wouldn't want to eat his lunch in peace?). If shot with a rectilinear ultra-wide lens, that guy would be smeared into 2x width. This image is uncorrected for distortion, but a Hemi correction would also work here and would be much better than a rectilinear image.

Here's a few examples of correction for fisheye shots:

Fisheye hemi can work very well for interior architectural shots even with no people. This place is a vast dome ceiling structure which appears much more natural in pictures with a fisheye than an ultra-wide lens.

a comparison with uncorrected, Hemi corrected and rectilinearly corrected (PTlens). As you can see, exterior architecture shots usually work best when corrected into rectilinear form.

And last, rectilinear correction and crop, which works here better to preserve the dimensions of the architecture than the Hemi-correction would. For shots with main interest on people, I wouldn't hesitate to use Hemi.

Boscolo New York Cafe in Budapest.

Nice sharing