Exile Tattoo

Nikon D7000, 10.5mm, f/4, shutter 1/60, ISO 450

This shot shows you some of the advantages of shooting with a short focal length lens, in this case a Nikon 10.5mm lens. Lenses with extremely short focal lengths are sometimes called “fisheye” lenses for reasons that should be obvious when you look at the pictures they produce. Though there’s no official definition of the term, the fisheye bending effect is usually visible at lengths shorter than 15mm or so.

The biggest disadvantage to fisheye lenses is of course the distortion. Subjects toward the center of the shot usually come out okay, but the closer you get to the edge the more bending you get. Look at the doorway in the lefthand side of the shot, The frame is more or less okay on the right-hand side, but the left looks like something out of an old carnival funhouse.

Because fisheye lenses pack so much more information into your picture, it can be tough to get absolutely everything in the shot completely perfect. This exposure is good for the room on the left, but the exterior window way down the hall to the right is overexposed. Here it doesn’t ruin the shot, because the people are important and whatever might be going on outside the window isn’t.

Still, such lenses can be challenges. Try taking one outside on a cloudless day and you’ll soon find just how hard it is to keep the sun out of your shot.

On the other hand, fisheye lenses are great for capturing scenes. The wide angle allowed me to get not just the tattooist at work but also the rest of the shop, which of course would have been impossible with a longer lens.

For what it’s worth, this photo was actually inspired by another one I took a couple of months earlier:

Nikon D3000, Lensbaby wide angle, no f-stop, shutter 1/100, ISO 800

I shot this one with a Lensbaby Scout with wide angle optics installed. The focus problems are partially my fault; I’d been shooting closer to the subjects and forgot to readjust, and Lensbaby lenses don’t work with the camera’s autofocus feature. I might also have been able to reduce the vignetting (the darkness in the corners of the picture) by using an f-stop, which I would have needed to manually install prior to shooting.