Photography – having fun with a fisheye

I’ve loved photography for years, way before I started blogging and my canon 600D is probably my most prized possession, so whenever Christmas or a birthday rolls around I usually have some sort of accessory on my list and this year it was a fisheye lens.

*Did you know - it’s called a fisheye lens because the distorted image it takes is similar to the view of a fish when looking towards the surface of the water.*  I’ve always loved this effect so am looking forward to having some fun with it!

Proper fisheye lenses can be really expensive (from £200 to over £1,000!) and seeing as I was just after something to play around with I thought this Opteka lens was far better value for money at just £45 and it had some encouraging reviews on amazon. Rather than being a lens in itself this one fits on the end of your existing lens and converts it to fish eye. After a brief stint on Christmas Day, I took the lens on its first proper outing last week and here are the results. Drumroll please.

When zoomed fully out you can create almost a complete circle and the effect is at its strongest, the more you zoom in the more of the circle you cut out and the weaker the effect. The really bright winter sunshine (hello vitamin D. Finally!) also created a few interesting light spots on one of the pictures which I really like. 

Here fishy fishy...