Micro 4/3 Samyang Fisheye

Ray Sachs

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Location
Not too far from Philly
Name
you should be able to figure it out...
There's a new fisheye for m43, made by Samyang. I've sort of wanted to check out a fisheye, but could never see paying the price for the Pany, but the Samyang is only about $400, its manual focus and manual aperture control, and its about the size of the Pany 25mm. I don't know if I'll find enough use to keep it, but its a lot of fun to play around with. Did my typical walk through the nearby ag preserve with my dog and shot with it a bit.

You can go with the overwhelming fishy perspective:

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Or you can just use it as a superwide, without being toooo obvious (although I don't think trees grow like that):

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Or if its just fishy enough, you can cook the processing to get the implication of it coming from a different planet, because you know SOMETHING is off:

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This one is a fake IR treatment, which looks pretty much like IR when you leave it in B&W, but when you put the color back in, it mostly looks weird. I like weird.

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I haven't seen such intense and obvious flare since my old Pentax K1000 - I know its a flaw but I've always liked it:

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-Ray
 
The lens looks like a great performer with your shots - edges look pretty sharp. Good use of the distortion in the first shot.
 
I've ordered the Oly FE attachment. I wish I had the Samyang to compare. Maybe we can compare notes after I get it.

Great shots by the way. I agree with many folks who say the novelty of FE can wear off, and it's true, but if it's cheap enough, it's always great to have one around, and especially if it's got a good MFD. Then you can really play!

Do you know what degree view the Samyang provides? The FE converter is only to 120 degrees :( (but it's also only $127)
 
Its a nice lens, as nice as I could ever want in a fisheye. I don't really know how the corner sharpness compares to others, but with that much inherent distortion, I'm not really worried about it. And unlike with a portrait lens where AF can be really beneficial, there's no downside to this lens being all manual. Even wide open at f3.5, you can set the focus to infinity and everything from about a foot and a half and out is in focus - stopping it down brings the near focus point closer, but its already incredibly close. The first shot, above, with the dog was taken with me probably within a foot or so of her, probably at about f8, and the focus never left infinity the whole time I was out. The DOF is insane. And its as wide as you'd ever want. Its tough to keep all of your body parts out of the shot unless you hold the lens well in front of you and if you're trying to shoot past a fence or railing, same thing, its tough not to pick up some portion of it in the shot.

-Ray
 
I've ordered the Oly FE attachment. I wish I had the Samyang to compare. Maybe we can compare notes after I get it.

Great shots by the way. I agree with many folks who say the novelty of FE can wear off, and it's true, but if it's cheap enough, it's always great to have one around, and especially if it's got a good MFD. Then you can really play!

Do you know what degree view the Samyang provides? The FE converter is only to 120 degrees :( (but it's also only $127)

I'd be curious too. Thinking about getting the wide angle and fish eye converter.
 
As Stratokaster noted, its a claimed 180 degrees shooting 4:3 and I didn't see anything while using it that makes me doubt that. All of my stuff is shot at 3:2 and a couple of my portrait orientation shots are cropped back down to 4:3, so mine won't quite be 180 on the horizontal shots and will be a bit less yet on the vertical shots that have been cropped. But I don't doubt that if I shot an uncropped 4:3, it would be the full 180.

-Ray
 
Imagine what you can achieve with this lens and the multi-aspect-ratio sensor in the Panasonic GHx bodies... While the diagonal angle of view will be the same (180 degrees), the horizontal one will be quite a bit wider.
 
The nice postal people just dropped off my F-CON, which I popped on my EPL2 + kit lens. First off, it's lighter than I thought, but having used FEs before (on both Canon DSLR and the NEX attachment), this isn't particularly fishy. I think the Samyang is fishier, based on Ray's shots. I'm going away this weekend with it (and with a rented Nokton 25mm), so I'll post some results/thoughts after this weekend.
 
Thanks for the images and comments. I really like the subtle impact on the landscape shots... as you said a good weird! Do you think the inability to use a filter would impact you using this long term for landscapes?
 
Thanks for the images and comments. I really like the subtle impact on the landscape shots... as you said a good weird! Do you think the inability to use a filter would impact you using this long term for landscapes?

I'm not a huge landscape shooter or filter user. So, no, it wouldn't really have any impact on ME for landscapes. But for a serious landscape photographer, it might. Then again, I don't think a lot of serious landscape photographers are doing much work with fisheyes either...

-Ray
 
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