Secrets of Digital Photography
Fisheye Lens Report!    
November, 2003

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All photos by the author.

WARP!

TWO FISHEYES, NO WAITING!

When Nikon introduced the first fisheye lens for film photography, decades ago, eyebrows shot up. What a novel point of view!

Five years ago, when Nikon introduced their first serious digital camera, the Coolpix 900, they had a fisheye CONVERTER in mind and the FC-E8 caused more eyebrows to shoot up.

Get your eyebrows ready for some aerial stunts, because the second Coolpix Fisheye is in house. The FC-E9 is bigger, bolder and brighter than the 'E8 and to give it a test drive we took it to the new Walt Disney Concert Hall (WDCH) in Los Angeles for an afternoon of sheer delight.

You remember the WDCH don't you? It's that Frank Gehry building in LA that looks like a symphony frozen in mid-crescendo? In fact, the building is so cool that it looks like it already WENT through a fisheye lens before they finished the plans.

For four hours we crawled all over the WDCH and shot its lovely curves from every angle. The FC-E9 was affixed to our CP5400 (using the UR-E10 adapter tube) and most of the other photographers there went Ohh and Ahh when they saw it. The shots were gathered zoomed into the image for a frame filling fish effect. Many of these images are now in the new Nikon Optical Converters chapter in the new version of the Nikon eBook.

We learned something from this shoot. The E9 is not perfectly sharp in the corners. Well, heck, it's a fisheye. Some chromatic aberration was observed, too.

Never mind. iNovaFX to the rescue. Now I have a new iBCFish Photoshop Action Filter to clean up the corners and fix the aberrations. All the images above went through it to their great benefit.

Wait a minute. If I have it--that means you have it too. It's in the new V6 Nikon eBook along with more shots from that session, just waiting for you to get the most out of your FC-E9 Fisheye.


Get the eBooks. We have a secure order page that will allow previous eBook owners to upgrade for low cost, too. Or you can call direct and order from the publisher by phone or FAX.
Phone:(310) 475 2988 (M-F 9-5 Pacific Time)  
FAX (310) 475 9486 (24hrs).


© 2003 Peter iNova. All rights reserved. Do not reprint. Simply add a link to this page.
Reprinting except for newsworthy mention and brief quotes are by permission only.


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