Fish Eye Beach

A while back I decided I wanted a fisheye lens. I looked in various places and discovered that a good Nikon wide angle cost a minimum of $600. Choke. Since I didn’t really think I was going to be taking any amazing artistic photos with it, I figured $600 - $1000 was a lot of money for just a toy. So, I looked around and saw there were some nice fisheye adapters. You stick them between your own lens and a camera body, and they make the lens into a fisheye. They only cost about $50. The cheapest was about $35. Much better. I got one for Christmas. (*yay*). Now, real fisheye lenses are in the range of 8 to 12 mm focal length. Turns out my main lens starts at 18mm focal length, which is pretty wide. About as wide as you can get without getting into the distortion of the fisheye wide angle. Sticking the adapter onto my regular lens got me the fisheye effect, all right. It also created a lot of specular distortion and refraction. It was OK for fun snaps, but was painfully bad for any real photography. Oh well. The photo here is what happens when you combine two wide angle lenses. The first lens widens the image at the 18mm focal length. The second one widens even further, and ends up taking a photo of the inside of your main lens. It was taken at the beach (duh) near Laguna Beach. Photography overkill to the max.