sllɐqǝʎǝʎzznɟ

I’ve always loved fisheye lenses but they’re pricey. Long ago, I had a Peleng fisheye which I sold off because I kinda hate doing manual focus when using a DSLR. Then one day … I found this used Tokina 10-17 fisheye at quite an affordable price and without a second thought … ermm … bought it. It has been quite a while already but I’ve yet to really make full use of it apart from a couple of test shots. Not that I don’t like it … but I’ve been using my film cameras more than the DSLR for the last few years.

I love this lens because of the zoom capability. Many fisheye lenses are prime lenses and when you do not want that much of the fishy eye effect … you’ll have to do some ‘correction’ in Photoshop which I don’t really fancy. The Tokina’s 10-17mm zoom solves this problem eventhough you still get (less) fisheye effect at 17mm.

It is also stated that this lens is not meant for full frame DSLRs or 35mm cameras I read that by zooming in at 14mm … it works well on a SLR. So does it work well? Nah! Not at 14mm! I’ll probably need to zoom in a little more to get rid of the vignettings/black corners.

Somehow these two taken at Cafe Iguana looks better … maybe because the dark corners are not so obvious (or it could be the booze!).

See an example of a shot with more obvious dark corners … maybe I accidentally zoom out a little less than 14mm for this shot …

So what happens if I shoot at 10mm?

The dark weird frame is caused by the ‘permanent lens hood’ on the front of the lens. Come to think of it … it looks pretty cool like a black weird patterned frame eh?

As a consolation, I managed to finish the last few shots photographing Fitzand before we went for his weekend bicycle ride … and they turned out rather cool …