Lensbaby Fisheye Optic

I was eagerly searching for an affordable fisheye lens for my Canon 40D after seeing some friends really do excellent work with this type of lens. With this Fisheye Optic installed, my LensBaby Composer (View Product) has been transformed from an occasional toy lens to a utility lens that I want to use every single day. It's important to know that this fisheye optic does not reproduce the typical LensBaby radial blur patterns...it simply turns your LensBaby into a Fisheye Lens.

We got this little optic two days before traveling to Costa Rica. My thinking at the time was that I wanted a nice super-wide angle lens to go along with the rest of my gear (a 24-70 f/2.8L, a 70-200 f/4L, and a Tamron 17-35 Wide Angle). On a trip where we expected to be in some tight quarters, small rooms and crowded forests, the lens made sense in order to cram as much of the scenery into the frame as possible.

I ended up using this lens much more than expected because it proved to be surprisingly versatile.

PROS:
- Wide-angle captures 170 degrees in your field of view
- Chromatic Aberration is limited to the extreme edges of the frame
- Even on a cropped image-sensor, you can still replicate the fisheye effect.
- A great lens for shooting the night sky, room interiors, sweeping landscapes.
- The horizontal center of the frame is rendered with little or no distortion or curve, making it possible to have a straight horizon even with everything else bending into the frame.
- Durable construction (it's metal)
- Choose your own aperture, from f/4 to f/22. I stuck with f/8 and am almost always satisfied with the result.
- Macro capability lets you get as close as 1" to your subject and the focus can still be razor-sharp.

CONS:
- It is a little difficult to install and remove from the LensBaby...so much so that I was worried I was forcing it too hard during the optic swap, and had to try two or three times to be satisfied with its position.
- There is no thread at the end of the lens, so you can not use the step-up/shade (View Product) or add any kinds of filters (though they would easily be in the field of view!)
- You'll have to carry around a (provided) second set of aperture discs...and the apertures for the Fisheye Optic are so small that it makes the regular creative aperture kits incompatible.
- If you're not careful, you can make people appear to have some very unflattering physical attributes. Keep them in the center of the frame! (or, for more fun...don't)

I'll get back to what it's like to have this lens on the camera: it's so fun! Things that are round, like rainbows, almost appear without any distortion at all. It's fun to play with perspective on things like the horizon. For instance, looking out at the ocean, if you just tilt the camera down, you can get your feet and the distant horizon in the same shot. In another case, while shooting a waterfall, just tilting the camera up a bit actually brought the tops of the trees behind us into the picture, without losing the bottom of the falls.

There are a few challenges when it comes to using a fisheye lens:
1. Macro photography doesn't end up feeling like it, because the perspective is warped away from the center of the frame, making even an insect or an ant seem somehow further away than it really is. You have to get really inventive with your angle in order to make something like a bug look impressive.
2. It makes really big things seem small. If you're looking at something that is massive, but distant, it'll be so diminished in the fisheye perspective that is will seem unrecognizable. Volcanoes and mountains seemed to flatten out.
3. It's often hard to avoid getting the sun or the moon, or some kind of washed-out light in the frame. You'll have to be creative about what you do with all the extra light sources that aren't being cropped out in the picture.

All told, this is my favorite lens to use. I dare say that with some real patience, you could generate some professional-level results with it. For $150, I have no regrets.

I didn't want to spend $600 on a fisheye lens, and I wanted a Lensbaby Composer anyway, so I bought this to go along with it. It's probably not as great as some $600+ fisheye lens, but to me it's more than good enough for the money.

Using this with a composer, though, means that you're usually going to want to center it in the frame which is a bit of a pain to do. Once you get it centered well enough you'll want to tighten down the tension ring on the composer so it won't move because you're not going to want to have to recenter it over again.

As a previous reviewer stated, there are no threads on the front so attaching accessories is not possible.

While you can insert "creative aperture disks" in place of a normal aperture disk, the maximum aperture for the lens is not large enough to cover the whole aperture disk design area. So you'll end up "cropping" off all but a small part of the middle of whatever standard creative aperture design you pick.

You may be able to cut your own aperture disks with the whole design within the aperture limits of the lens, but I haven't tried this and don't know how well it works in general. I did insert a standard "creative" kit disk with a lot of detail in the middle, and it did work to the extent that it could, so it is possible.

this lens is amazing. So much fun and adds so much creativity to photography. It brings the fun of film back to the camera.