Description: Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 Aspherical Fisheye Manual Focus Lens
The Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens is an excellent addition to any photographer's collection, giving users the ability to expand their creativity and capture incredible scenes from a truly unique perspective.
This manual focus lens, when used with cameras with an APS-C image sensor, creates images with an expanded perspective, including images with a creatively deformed outlook and a sharp pan focus that extends throughout the entire frame. By offering a 180-degree angle of view, this fisheye lens can be used to create amazing image expressions that cannot be seen by the human eye, such as exaggerated perspective and distortion. The minimum shooting distance (just 12 inches) and large depth of field also provide amazing close-up shots.
A fisheye lens is a wide-angle lens that takes in an extremely wide, hemispherical image. Originally
developed for use in meteorology to study cloud formation and called "whole-sky lenses", fisheye lenses quickly became popular in general photography for their unique, distorted appearance. They are often used by photographers shooting broad landscapes to suggest the curve of the Earth. Hemispherical photography is used for various scientific purposes to study plant canopy geometry and to calculate near-ground solar radiation.
The first types of fisheye lenses to be developed were "circular fisheyes" — lenses which take in a 180° hemisphere and project this as a circle within the film frame. Some circular fisheyes
are available in orthographic projection models for scientific applications. These have a 180° vertical angle of view, and the horizontal and diagonal angle of view are also 180°. Most circular fisheye lenses cover a smaller image circle than rectilinear lenses, so the corners of the frame will be completely dark.
Alternative Fisheye Lenses
Features
In addition, this lens incorporates the latest optical multi-coating techniques. The process of multi-coating assures virtually flare-free photographs even under adverse lighting conditions, resulting in crisp, high-contrast pictures.
Key Features:
♦ Conforms to APS-C (1:1.5x) size digital imaging format
♦ Actualizes 8mm focal length and a diagonal angle of view of 180 degrees for APS-C size
♦ Corrects aberrations using a complex aspherical lens. When fully opened, it produces both high resolution and high contrast at the center of the lens, as well as around the periphery of the lens.
♦ Petal type hood and multi-coating help control flaring and ghosting
♦ Offers robust durability by incorporating a rigid aluminum base frame
♦ Super Spectra lens multi-coating
♦ Minimum focusing distance of 12 inches (0.3m)
Lens Includes
•
Rokinon 8mm f/3.5 Aspherical Fisheye Manual Focus Lens
• Front & Rear Lens Caps
• Lens Hood
• Lens Pouch
• 1-Year Warranty
Reviews
Charge Up Your Creative Juices!, April 23, 2010
By J. Blilie "Naturalist-Skeptic" (Twin Cities, MN)
This is a very nice little aspherical fisheye. It is quite sharp, especially at f/8 and above. The CA is limited and not bothersome. The flare is excellent when the sun (or bright source) is near the edge of the frame. You get some attractive colorless star points and streams that don't interfere with the image. It gets a distinctive, dense bright blue coin flare when the sun is more toward the 1/3 lines along with some other typical (five-petal) f-stop flares. They don't cover much of the image and can be used creatively. If you lay on the ground I think you can get the ground in the frame in all four corners (or pretty darned close).
As expected: awesome depth of field at small apertures. Bright, nice contrast, good sharpness that (typical for the type) suffers some at the edges, nice color. Bokeh (can you have bokeh at 8mm??) is nice, such as there is anything out of focus. The Pentax version has an automatic aperture, which I understand is missing for Nikon and Canon. Soliud build, nice smooth manual-only focus, good focus marks (I focus almost exclusively using the range marks on the barrel) but no depth of field marks, which I do miss. No worries, at f/8 and above, everything from about 12-inches to infinity is in focus. Can you say hyperfocal point? Nice (plastic) cap that covers the entire first element (big curve) and fixed lens hood.
All in all, a great little lens that will open up some new creative avenues for you; and for this little money? a no-brainer. Search for f3nrich's [sic] work on Flickr for some splendid examples. Or just search the web for 8mm fisheye examples.
