Sometimes you just wanna have some fisheye fun. I didn’t want to spend too much on a fisheye lens since I’m not going to use it professionally (for now). I picked up an Opteka 6.5mm f3.5 HD Aspherical Fisheye Lens with Removable Hood for about $150 on Amazon.
It’s sold under a bunch of different brands, but it’s the same lens regardless of price. Most of them say 8mm, so hy Opteka claims 6.5mm is a mystery to me. Here are some links to the more popular versions.
- Rokinon FE8M-N 8mm F3.5 Fisheye Fixed Lens for Nikon (Black)
- Samyang SYHD8M-N 8mm f/3.5 HD Fisheye Fixed Lens with Removable Hood for Nikon
- Albinar 8mm f/3.5 HD Aspherical Fisheye Lens for Nikon
Some of them have a chip to tell the camera aperture setting, but it’s really not needed.
There may have been some update to improve the quality since I got mine, but I’m not sure which one I have to be honest.
If you really want a quality fisheye, get the Nikon AF DX NIKKOR 10.5mm f/2.8G ED Fixed Zoom Fisheye Lens with Auto Focus.
It works on both DX and FX (in DX Mode). If you saw off the hood, you can use the lens on and FX and get a similar effect as the images I have below – An almost full circle image. There are some youtube videos on how to do this, but basically use a dremel very carfully.
As for my Opteka, the lens is manual focus and has an aperture ring to set f-stop. Just set it to f/5.6 and estimate the distance. The focus ring has distance marks. It’s virtually useless to try and focus by eye. Setting the apeture at f/3.5 or f/8 really makes no difference, but at f/3.5 the lens is a bit soft. f/5.6 seems to be a happy medium. My particular lens doesn’t tell the camera anything, so I manually enter the settings in the non-cpu lens profile menu on my Nikon. Then I shoot in aperture priority so the camera will adjust the shutter speed automatically. Generally the exposures come out fine, but I do get the occasional shot that is way off. Maybe 1 in 20.
