[Blelidupgerie]

I got a friend who's been taking a lot of photos in a fish eye lens (either he's got a proper fish eye lens or he's got one of those adapters) and I like the effect ofit.

Anyway, I've found a couple of fish eye lenses but they're waaay too expensive (£300+). So thought I'd go for the cheap options so I can mess around with the effect, by purchasing one of those adapters from ebay. Yes those twist on adapters that you can get for about £40-£50.

However I'm a little confused from some of the information I have read online.

Some of the fish eye adapters come with a multiplier e.g. 0.22x / 0.30x/ 0.45x which make no sense to me. I read you mutliply whatever lens you're using with that multiplier and the end result is what the equivalent in length in real e.g. if I got a .22x and put it on my 50mm prime it'd be equivalent to 11mm.

Additionally, I'd like the fish eye effect to be properly rounded so will I be able to achieve it with the 50mm prime? I know the 350D (which I have) is a cropped senser and I've read even if I was to get a fish eye lens (like the Zenitar 16mm f2.8 for £100 from ebay) I wouldn't get the nice rounded effect since most fish eye lenses the rounded effect is towards the outside, thus since it's cropped it gets cut off.

[PaulCameron]

I hate fisheye so I can't give specifics, but if you're worried about cropping, why not use the adapter on a smaller digital lens? If you match the size there'd be no cut off. If all you have are FF lenses try a step down adapter (I'm assuming the fisheye adaptors screw on using the filter threads). Calculating the needed size shouldn't be that hard.

Also keep in mind you could get an old t-mount fisheye, get an adaptor, and focus to infinity with a large aperture and shoot anything past a few feet all day.

AND if you get a circular fisheye lens the cropped part of the photo would be the black area anyway, so who cares that you lost it?



ONE MORE THING... you may want to look at the lensbaby instead. Or not, I dunno.