Thursday, 25 August 2011

Comparison of fisheye lenses with wide angle lenses at equal focal lengths.reflection

Here’s a post which is designed to save me a couple of emails per month, so please bear with me.

I often get asked (usu­ally by people who saw my pan­or­amic pho­to­graphy tutorial videos) if they can use a “reg­u­lar” 8mm or 10mm wide angle lens instead of an 8mm or 10mm fisheye lens (on a cam­era with a 1.5x crop sensor is used) to pro­duce full 360×180° pan­or­a­mas.

The answer is: Of course you can, but you will need to take more images to cover the entire sphere. With both fisheye lenses, you can get away with as little as 4 images to cover everything — with the non-​fisheyes you need a bare min­imum of 12, but more like 16 shots to have cap­tured everything.

Without want­ing to get tech­nical, this has to do with the field of view that both lens types offer (due to the dif­fer­ent pro­jec­tions): The fisheye typ­ic­ally shows you much more than the wide angle since, grossly sim­pli­fied, the fisheye “squeezes” things the more you move away from the cen­ter, whereas the wide angle lens tends to “stretch” things. In terms of num­bers, both fisheyes give you a 180° field of view around the diag­onal. The wide angle lenses in turn only give you 110 – 120°…

Click on the image above to see a quick visual com­par­ison between the dif­fer­ent lenses /​images they pro­duce. Pay par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to what is included and what is not included in the extreme corners.

Lenses used: Peleng 8mm ƒ/3.5 fisheye and Sigma 10mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye on a 1.5x crop sensor, and a Sigma 12-​24mm on full frame sensor (to sim­u­late 8mm/​10mm on crop).

Posted at 21:32
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6 Comments »

  1. happy to read your blogs …

    if i‘m to do some pano shoot­ing i should then get the Sigma 10mm fisheye ( and remove the mask) as stated in a recent blog
    I have a friend who is a photo equip­ment sales­man and i will ask him about this.

    george — 1 January 2012 @ 18:34

  2. @ George: No, don’t get a 10mm, unless you have a pan­or­amic tri­pod head. Get an 8mm instead. The 10mm + shav­ing is a very par­tic­u­lar thing, not really recom­men­ded for a begin­ner, since a) it’s not easy to get the lens shaved, b) it “ruins” the lens …

    Florian — 2 January 2012 @ 16:23

  3. hello m8 , hows t going ? am buyin a new fisheye lens but am not sure which fisheye 2 get , i have 2 options here: Nikon 10.5 or Sigma 10mm .. am won­der­ing if the pro­jec­tion in the sigma 10mm is bet­ter? & the sigma has a wider aper­ture than nikon 10.5 right? not sure which one 2 get“i use Nikon d3100”… thx in advance :)

    ryan james — 9 January 2012 @ 21:27

  4. @ Ryan: Sorry, don’t know how these lenses com­pare, I only have the 10mm Sigma and it’s much bet­ter than the Peleng 8mm, that’s for sure. Sorry, you’ll have to search else­where for a comparison.

    Florian — 9 January 2012 @ 21:31

  5. Hi,

    First of all, great videos and great web­site!!

    I’ve just bought a 10 –20mm Sigma lens for my canon 60d crop sensor dslr. I’m plan­ning on doing some more land­scape stuff, hence the lens.

    I’d like to use it for full 360⁄180 pan­or­a­mas and you indic­ate I’d need 16 to 20 images. What would the format be? 2 rows of 8 plus nadir and zenit? What would you recom­mend?

    Many thanks,

    Kenny

    Kenny g — 15 June 2012 @ 0:43

  6. @ Kenny: Yeah, that’s one way that would work. But there are also altern­at­ive pat­terns. Check out this handy ref­er­ence.

    Florian — 15 June 2012 @ 1:20


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