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Since months I had been thinking about a fisheye but the Canon and Sigma seemed too pricey for what I considered an ' exotic lens ' with , maybe , limited usage which I could very well not like at all .... Two weeks ago , looking around on ebay , I saw many Zenitar 2.8 16mm offered for auction . The price they were going for was incredibly low . I bid for one and got it for € 100 .I didn't expect much for that money but was pleasantly surprised when I got it in my hands .It's well built and really small . It has an EOS mount and fits well on my 1DMkII . The metering can be done in Manual Mode but there's another way to make the camera and lens communicate together : Set your camera on Av mode with the aperture setting on 1.0 ( yes , 1.0 ! ) . Select the desired aperture manually on the lens and there it works ! All pics below were taken at f 5.6 and f 8 . I could shut down to f 11 od f 16 but I read somewhere the performances of the lens will fall off past f 8 . Not tried yet , to be honest .... The AF needs to be manual as the camera has no contacts with the lens . This is really easy on a lens of this type . For every subject exceeding a few meters , I set the focus at infinity . The hyperfocal reach seems endless . Also , and this wasn't expected , the minimum focus distance is around 10cm ( less than 4 inch ) . See pics of the flowers . It's a well known fact , fish eyes and very large wide angles give distortion ( in this case a lot ) as soon as the horizon is not kept horizontal . To put this right , there is the defishing method . To me , the easiest software to use is the plug-in Panorama Tools which comes for free . Some users already have explained their workflow and this one I found excellent and easy to follow : Razzi's Photolog How to defish for a Canon D30, D60, 10D and 300D
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Conclusion : I find this lens AMAZINGLY cheap solid small sharp fun to use |
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Reviews of the Zenitar 16mm 2.8 Fisheye : Review - Russian Zenitar 16mm f-2.8 Fisheye for Canon 10D |
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Originals ( not defished ) |
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