Something between a fisheye and a wide angle

<p>Looking for advice/opinions on choosing a lens that would give a wide angle on a 1.6 crop with moderate distortion for looming foregrounds. I'm thinking the right lens would either be a 15mm fisheye, or 10-22mm wide angle, but I'm not really sure. I'm not looking for extreme fisheye distortion, so that's why I discounted the 8mm and 10mm fisheyes, but I'm afraid the 15mm might still be too much. On the other hand, I'm afraid that the 10-22mm wide angles might not give enough distortion. As a baseline, I shot the below sample at 17mm, using my 17-55 (please ignore everything else that's wrong with the picture - it's just a snapshot for the sake of making an example). I would like a bit more exaggeration than this. I don't want the entire frame to be drastically warped, but I want the foreground to be a bit more prominent. What are your thoughts? Sample pictures would be very helpful, too!</p><div></div>

<p>As long as you can get the field of view that you need, you can easily fix the perspective to your heart's content in Photoshop or similar. </p>

<p>I don't think you quite understand distortion and the difference between rectilinear and fisheye lenses.</p>

<p>I<em> think(?) </em>what you are looking for is a very short focal length (very wide angle) rectilinear lens. The best you could do there would be the Sigma 8-16mm rectilinear zoom set to 8mm. The second best bet would be the Canon 10-22 or one of the 3rd party 10-20/24 lenses set to 10mm.</p>

<p>Both rectilinear and fisheye lenses "distort", they just do so in different ways. Rectiliner wide angles keep straight lines straight but can distort relative sizes, while fisheye lenses keep the relative sizes of things more in proportion but make (some) straight lines curve). See <a href="http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/field_of_view.html">http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/technical/field_of_view.html</a></p>

<p>If you want stuff closer to the camera to appear larger in proportion to more distant stuff (as in the example below), you can't "fix" or create this type of "distortion" with PhotoShop. You need a wide angle lens shot from close to your subject.</p><div></div>

<p>Bob's explanation, as usual, is very good.</p>

<p>If you want to know even more about the issues of perspective distortion and what happens with fisheye lenses look at</p>

<p><br /> perspective distortion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion_%28photography%29<br /> fisheye: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens</p>

<p>Tokina 10-17</p>

<p>Here you go, bottom is 10mm, w/ the front point ~1' away from the lens, and the top pic is 17mm @ ~3.5' away from the lens.</p>

<p>Just a quick example to show you the diff.</p>

<p>As you can see, the perspective difference is quite a bit, which is because the change in distant is ~10x vs. ~3x Meaning the back of the subject is about 10x the distance the front of the subject is from the camera vs. about 3x in the 17mm example)</p><div></div>

<p>Search Rokinon 14mm F2.8 to see if you like it.</p>

Tokina 11-16. Not sure if it's wide enough, but it's a great crop body wide angle lens.

<p>Markus - I suspect your captions are switched. The top shot look like 17mm, the bottom shot look like 10mm</p>

<p>Bob, you are absolutely right, caption is switched, the post text is correct. :-)</p>

<p>Ah, yes. The Subie at 10mm looks like what I'm going for!</p>

<p>Another vote for the Sigma 8-16mm.<br>

Here are some test shots I made with my copy when I got it: http://moving-target-photos.com/samples/Sigma_8-16mm_at_C29/</p>

<p>What are you photographing? If it has straight lines, and you need to keep the straight lines straight, you need a rectilinear lens. The "cost" of using this lens is that the margins will be stretched and "swoopy."</p>

<p>If what you're photographing has relatively fewer straight lines, or if all the important straight lines go through the middle of the frame, or if there are a lot of smaller objects you need to keep roughly the right shape, you might need a diagonal fisheye. Consider a crowd of people: A rectlinear UWA lens will make heads stretchy in the margins. On the lefthand side, people will have fat faces. On top and bottom, they will have tall and skinny faces. And in the corners, they will have smushed looking faces. With a fisheye, all the heads/faces will look approximately normal, but straight lines will get bent. People standing up in the left and righthand margins will be hunched over a bit, but they won't be fat.</p>

<p>You can also use a fisheye lens and crop out a smaller portion from the centre of the image circle. This will have less fisheye distortion than the edges. If you use a 15mm fisheye on a crop body then this already happens for you (indeed, you don't see the full image circle even on full frame). But an 8mm or 10mm fisheye lens on a crop sensor could also do what you want, if you don't mind cutting off the sides of the image afterwards.</p>

<p>Sarah, I noticed what you were talking about in Geoff's pictures, where images 1,2, and 5 don't have as many straight lines while images 3 and 4 show more fence and light posts, which appear stretched and skewed.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, I like to shoot everything, so I can't predict what I would be shooting. I suppose when doing looming foregrounds it would be mostly vehicles - cars, boats, planes, bikes, etc. I also like landscape shots that feature a prominent foreground object in conjunction with eye-catching scenery in the back (landscape shots where everything is at a distance can tend to be too flat). Or artistic shots where I want to manipulate proportions (such as the famous absurdly large dog nose pictures).</p>

<p>Ed, I prefer not to crop - it just feels like I'm not getting full use of all those pixels I bought. That is why I was leaning toward the 15mm in the fisheye group.</p>