Project 365: Poor Woman's Fisheye Lens
On day 10 of my Project 365 I took a photo of our kitchen. I don’t have a proper wide angle lens (yet) so I had to be creative. Here’s our white renovated kitchen from a special point of view.
Speaking of wide angle lenses… I currently have a Nikon kit lens (18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR) with a widest angle of 76 degrees at 18mm. I would like to get a wider lens in the near future for interior and scenery photographs. I have a few options which fit into my strict budget. At the moment it’s quite difficult to say exactly which features I want or need so I have to go to test some lenses in a local store.
I’m not that into barrel effect so pure fisheye lenses are out of the question. Tokina has AT-X 107 10-17mm f/3.5-4.5 lens which combines a fisheye and a super wide angle lenses into one. It offers angles from 180° to 100° but even at 17mm (100°) the barrel effect is visible. Tokina also has AT-X 116 11-16mm f/2.8 and AT-X 124 12-24mm f/4 wide angle lenses that have smaller distortion on the edges. Also Sigma has a 10-20mm f/4-5.6 wide angle but it loses to Tokina lenses in speed. Korean Samyang has the cheapest option: fully manual 14mm f/2.8 which offers great speed and slightly over 100° angle in DX format. Samyang lens was announced in August/September but the launch has been postponed a few times. It’s not available in stores yet.
