Monday 28 June 2010

Poppies and a fisheye

As I mentioned a couple of posts back, I set myself a target to get an unusual picture of  poppies using only my fisheye lens.

Yesterday was that day. I set out on my bike to a place that my wife told me about where she had seen some good examples.

Armed with only my EOS 5d and a Russian Zenitar 16mm fisheye lens, I set about trying to get something different.I decided to go for a "worm's eye" view of the flowers.

Setting  the aperture on the (manual) lens at f16 which I have found to be its "sweet spot" and manually setting the focus at 60 cm gave me a sharpness range from 26 cm to infinity. The ISO was set to 100. Exposure was also manually set at 1/400 sec.

I had bought some clingfilm along with me and after setting the self timer to ten seconds, I wrapped the camera in it. this was because there was lots of dust and pollen flying around and I didn't want any of it going into the camera.

The first thing you notice when using the fisheye is that because it's so wide (180 degrees coverage), everything is so small and everything is included in the frame. I laid the camera on its back and after pressing the shutter, retreated out of the field of view. I made several images and this is the one that I liked the best.


Eos 5d. Zenitar 16mm. 
100 ISO. 1/400 @f16

I would loved to have found a more dense concentration of the flowers but sadly, there were none in the area that I knew of. I can always start planning for next year though.

The flowers here were only about eight
inches from the front element of the lens

See you next time.

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