It’s got better image quality and the photos coming out of your camera will be in a much more familiar format than the circular ones coming out of the Meike.
Canon full frame/crop if you’ve got a big budget: Canon 8-15mm fisheyeįor Sony a6000 users specifically I’d probably recommend the Samyang 8mm over the Meike for your first fisheye.Canon/Nikon APSC sensor (Canon 60D, 70D, 80D, 7D, Nikon D3000, D7000, D500 etc.): Tokina 10-17mm diagonal fisheye.Micro Four Thirds (Olympus, Panasonic etc.): Samyang 7.5mm diagonal fisheye.
Here’s a similar 360×180 photosphere image to the one in the video that I created with Hugin: Should I buy the Meike 6.5mm circular fisheye for surf photography? Using Hugin is outside the scope of this post but I recommend checking it out if you have a circular fisheye and you want to experiment with different ways of getting a more traditional looking image out of it.
There’s a great piece of free software called Hugin that gives you lots more control over editing this type of photo. That gives me a quick and easy correction that gets me pretty close to the field of view of the Samyang 8mm fisheye. To get this effect I used the built in lens corrections for the Sigma 4.5mm circular fisheye (about $900, available in various lens mounts), then changed the distortion slider to 72. Here’s my simple Lightroom preset that turns a shot from the Meike 6.5mm circular fisheye into a close approximation of the same shot taken on the Samyang 8mm fisheye.
I might go into more detail on this subject in the future, but I don’t want to delay getting this post up. You can rotate and then process the images so you can get a levelled photo however you were holding the camera.Ħ: Photo spheres, they’re part of the future of photography and a lens like this will let you take them quicker than any other. Obviously you sacrifice resolution, but as I mentioned in my post on long telephoto lenses, that’s not an issue for most surf photographers, including me.ĥ: Because it’s a circular image you can rotate it to make sure the horizon is level. The circular image is unique, you can’t get it with a GoPro, which is a pretty decent way of distinguishing you from lots of other people on Instagram.Ģ: This particular fisheye is really good value, half the price of the Samyang 8mm! So if you’re really on a tight budget it’s a great option.ģ: 190 degrees is wider than any other fisheye I’ve shot with, and any other circular fisheye for the Sony e mount, and you get that top to bottom as well as side to side, you can see behind you.Ĥ: With some fairly simple processing you can make your images look very similar to a diagonal fisheye. It’s different… I’ve said before that I try to only buy new kit that allows me to take photos that I can’t take with my current gear.