Oh no, I was scrolling through eBay again. Nothing good happens when I am on eBay.
Jokes aside, I was looking for a new lens. I already have a couple of prime lenses, good ones. However, there is one I am not super happy about - the 20mm f/2.8. It is a nifty wide-angle lens that I acquired late last year. I had wanted to experiment with wide-angle photography, having seen stunning photos of architecture on social media and in museums. Problem is, it never quite worked the way I would have liked. Maybe it's because SF is not exactly a concrete jungle and it's hard to get the lens to work the way I wanted, or maybe I just kinda suck (most likely). I have had some good results with star trail photography with this lens, but I just don't love it. Something is missing.
I think it might be because I actually really wanted a fisheye lens, not a wide-angle. They are typically around the same focal length. The difference is that with fisheye lenses, linear distortion is not corrected. So you end up with VERY curvy lines. There are two different kinds of fisheye lenses: circular and full-frame. The full-frame fisheyes produce a rectangular image with a fair amount of distortion, but the circular ones produce perfectly circular images. I am mainly interested in the former. I'd rather use the entire frame, and I don't want my hands to photobomb too easily.
That's one convoluted way to saying: I was shopping for a fisheye lens.
Initial Impression:
The 15mm f/2.8 fisheye lens is such a curious creature. I am not just talking about the bug-eyed curvature of the front element. You can't really mount filters to the front, so they've included three different filters just behind it. Red, orange, and yellow. I have yet to try them (successfully), but I assume they can come in quite handy in B&W photography. It is also not too heavy, so I liked that a lot as well.
However, I almost immediately discovered that it is extremely difficult to focus manually. I have a split-prism finder, so you focus until the top and bottom merge. With the distortion that comes with the fisheye, the center of your view is kind of squished into itself, so it is hard to see if the two parts are aligned. I didn't think much of it at the time, but this will become relevant later on.
Field Test:
Unfortunately, the first pictures I took with this lens turned out rather underwhelming. I used a roll of Portra 400 and Cinestill 800T. The first roll turned out to be a mistake because I had thought I loaded a roll of Tmax P3200 (which I usually shoot at ISO 800), so I basically shot the entire roll at 800, which I asked the lab to push one stop. Some sample images from these two rolls:
The ones in B&W were edited from Portra, the ones in color from Cinestill.
Takeaways:
Although I was initially disappointed by the results from this lens, I ended up loving it by the third roll. I like how magical and dramatic the portraits look. The difficulties with this lens are two fold - to get the portrait look, I have to get REALLY close to the subjects. Not to mention, it is extremely difficult to get perfect focus, especially in low light conditions. I have had to practice my people skills, approaching people and asking them to pose. It was daunting at first - I was terribly nervous and tongue-tied, but it got easier the more I asked. Then, in the brief moment when people still had the patience to stop whatever they were doing for a picture, I estimated focus based on the reading on the lens and my distance to the person in front of me before clicking the shutter.
I never thought about how different lenses pair with film types, but I have now come to the conclusion that I do not want to shoot color film with this lens. I find that the distortion from the lens on top of a myriad of colors might honestly give me a stroke. It is just a little too much. On the other hand, on the subsequent roll that I shot with this lens, I used Tmax P3200, which turned out quite well in my opinion. B&W film places emphasis on texture, structure, and lines. The fisheye effect seems to amplify these aspects in an excellent way.