While telephoto and zoom lenses get all the drama via their ability to capture compressed space and selective focus, wide-angle lenses, in the hands of experienced photographers, quietly and consistently deliver pleasing panoramas, luminous landscapes, amazing architecture, and superb street shots. Here’s a quick buying guide to help you decide on a wide angle vs fisheye lens, both prime and zoom.
Prime wide-angle lenses constantly deliver optically superior results compared to most zoom lenses, but because they are non-zooming lenses they require less complicated construction and therefore can be had at bargain prices. On the other hand, wide zooms are convenient and the better quality ones can rival primes for image quality.
What is a Fisheye Lens?
There are two kinds of fisheye lenses: Full-Frame Fisheye, and Circular Fisheye.
There are two kinds of fisheye lenses: full-frame fisheye and circular fisheye. Let’s take a look at how they differ.
Full-Frame Fisheye
A Full-Frame fisheye (16mm on a 35mm sensor full-frame camera and 10mm on an APS sensor camera) takes in a 180-degree angle of view when measured corner to corner, and the horizontal field of view is around 147 degrees. The image fills the entire frame but has the same characteristic barrel distortion as a circular fisheye.
With a full-frame fisheye camera lens, your photograph will fill the frame edge-to-edge like with any other lens, but horizontal and vertical lines will have a circular appearance. These kinds of fisheye images are useful for a range of subjects, from extreme sports and nature photography to unique portraits and product shots.
Circular Fisheye
A Circular fisheye is what most people think of. These lenses take in a 180-degree hemisphere and project it as a circle within the frame, surrounded by black.
While circular fisheye lenses are a bit more limited than full-frame fisheyes, they provide a completely unique appearance that can inspire your creativity in a number of ways.
When shooting circular images, you can focus on rounded subjects in the world around you or just explore traditional subjects with a novel circular frame. Fortunately, shooting with a digital camera frees you to experiment at will, because you’re not wasting money on every frame of film. Take chances and have fun!
Why Use a Fisheye Lens?
Fisheyes are generally novelty lenses and are used for special effects, although some architecture photographers use them to capture wide spaces, then correct the rectilinear perspective in post-production.
Expand Your Creativity with the Fisheye Effect
All photographers fall into a creative rut every now and then. When you’re blanking on how to advance your skills or create a new, unique body of work, consider investing in a new lens that’s outside the scope of your current gear.
Purchasing a fisheye lens for use with your DSLR camera or mirrorless camera will push you beyond your comfort zone so you can start rethinking your photographic techniques and approach.
With a bit of practice, you’ll find that there are many ways to re-engage with all your favorite subjects with the added functionality of a fisheye lens.
Fisheye Photography in Professional Applications
While fisheye lenses may not be ideal for every professional application, you can definitely give clients a more robust image collection with the help of a fisheye.
Wedding photographers probably won’t want to photograph the bride and groom’s first kiss with a fisheye lens, but there are some interesting and dramatic photos you can take with adventurous clients and a fisheye.
If you’re a sports photographer, using a fisheye lens is perfect for skateboarding, surfing, and other adventure sports because it makes the viewer feel closer to the action.
Using Fisheye Lenses in Videography
When you want to shake things up in your video content, a fisheye lens is a great tool to use. Plus, there are plenty of lenses on the market for every kind of camera lens mount, whether it’s micro four thirds, full frame, or crop sensor.
Most DSLR and mirrorless cameras can record in HD or 4K, so it’s easy to film short sequences or longer scenes with a fisheye lens and make the most of the engaging perspective.
Key Considerations for Fisheye Lenses
When shopping for your fisheye lens, pay attention to whether the lens is manual focus or autofocus. You can find a really affordable manual-focus lens if you don’t plan to get serious with your fisheye. However, if you want to take pro-level photos and video, using autofocus is always a good idea.
Is a Fisheye Lens Worth It?
If you’re a photographer who values portability when you shoot, then adding an additional lens to your kit requires some thought and intention. Ask yourself how often you’ll really use a fisheye lens. Does a fisheye work for the kind of photography you most commonly do?
If you’re a portrait photographer, a fashion photographer, or a food photographer, it’s unlikely that a fisheye lens will add much value to your kit and workflow. Your photography likely relies on realistic representation of subjects; fisheye lenses are anything but realistic.
If you’re a landscape photographer, architecture photographer, or you enjoy making viewers examine a common situation in a new way, a fisheye lens can help bring a new perspective to your work.
Experimenting with a fisheye lens is a great way to get a new viewpoint on old subjects. If you’re looking for something totally different, give fisheye camera work a try.
Selected fisheye lenses for Mirrorless Interchangeable-lens Camera (MILC):
- Olympus 9mm f/8 Fisheye Body Cap
- Panasonic 8mm f/3.5 Lumix G Fisheye Lens
- Yasuhara Makoda 180 Fisheye Lens for Sony E mount
- Canon RF 5.2mm f/2.8 L Dual Fisheye 3D VR Lens
Selected fisheye lenses for APS sensor cameras
- Meike 6.5mm f/2.0 Circular Fisheye Lens for Canon EF-M
- TTArtisan 7.5mm f/2 APS-C Fisheye Lens for Sony E
Selected fisheye lenses for DSLR cameras
- Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM
- Nikon 16mm f/2.8D ED AF Nikkor
- Sigma 15mm f/2.8 EX G Diagonal Fisheye for Nikon
What is a Wide Angle Lens?
I love my wides. They are naturally good choices for low light photography as the wider angle tends to reduce camera shake artifacts (although image stabilization doesn’t hurt), and you can buy them with big apertures so you can still get nice, blurry backgrounds and a pleasing bokeh effect.
How to Use a Wide Angle Lens?
Are you ready to go wide? Here are four suggestions to help you get the most photographic pleasure from your wide-angle lens.
1. Embrace the optical distortion
While a modern 35mm prime will deliver virtually no distortion and a 28mm will produce minimal amounts, straight lines will inevitably start to bend along the edges of an image as you use shorter and shorter focal lengths. You can either fight this by using the lens distortion correction feature in Photoshop (generally applied to RAW images) or you can incorporate pillow distortion into your image and appreciate the unique transformation this distortion applies to reality.
If you plan to adjust distortion in post processing, just remember that you’ll lose image real estate in the correction process. If possible, zoom out as much as you can, or physically back up to keep your subject within the center region of the frame. That way, even if you have to crop, you’ll still keep the most important elements.
If you don’t mind a little distortion, think about shooting from extreme angles to amplify the effect. You can create powerful perspective using the converging lines in your images.
2. Learn environmental portraiture
The big nose and exaggerated forehead look that’s typical of close-up photos of faces get old quickly. Flattering head-and-shoulder photos are not likely when shooting wide. Instead, back up, use the lens’s deep focus to show your subject in their environment…their home, workplace, or if you’re on vacation, show the vista surrounding them.
In an environmental portrait, consider not only the top, bottom, and sides of your frame, but the depth of your image as well. If you want to highlight more of your subject’s environment, increase the depth of field by shooting at a narrow aperture. You’ll bring more detail and context into the shot.
You can also incorporate the optical distortions we mentioned in the section above to add power to your portrait subject. Using a wide-angle lens from below a portrait subject creates a larger-than-life and extra-powerful perspective.
3. Take it all in
Shorter focal lengths produce images with greater depth of field than images shot with longer lenses at the same aperture. Choose a small aperture and you can render the entire scene, from a close element all the way to infinity, in sharp focus. This is great for Ansel Adams-like scenics (yes, he used f/64, but with a large-format camera; you can get similar depth at f/8 or f/11 with a 21mm or wider lens).
With a wide-angle lens, it’s easy to include so much visual information that the viewer doesn’t know where to look. Combat this overwhelming sensation for your viewers by carefully framing the scene in front of you.
Make sure you have a defined foreground, middle, and background. Consider leaning into your wide-angle lens’ natural vignetting in post processing to give the photo a more defined edge and to move the viewer’s eye through the frame.
4. Take it to the streets
Any street photographer worth their salt will tell you that a telephoto lens not only makes you look like a voyeur, but it forces you to work too far from the people you’re photographing. A wide-angle lens such as a 35mm or 28mm lets you work from a few feet away—a more intimate distance. At the same time, if you’re shooting between f/5.6 and f/11 you should have plenty of depth so you can juxtapose interesting background elements with your subject. Working close is one of the secrets of good street photography, and a wide-angle lens makes it possible.
Wide-angle lenses also make it much easier to shoot from the hip. If you’re not bringing your camera to your eye, you’re much less of a distraction to your subject. The wide frame helps hedge your bets on capturing your subject.
Shooting from the hip takes practice if you still want to frame your shots as intended. But as long as you’re at least a few feet away from your subject, you should be able to catch it in frame.
Now, let’s look at some great wide-angle lenses:
Standard Wide Angle Lens
The range from 28-45mm (or 35mm angle of view equivalent in smaller sensor cameras) would be considered standard wide-angle focal lengths; many wide-angle zooms cover the extreme-to-standard range but could be rather pricey; prime lenses cost less, tend to be slightly sharper optically (although the casual observer may not notice the difference) and sport wider apertures. At this range, optical distortion is minimal or non-existent, making these lenses desirable for a wide variety of photos.
Wide angle lens uses:
Standard wide-angle lenses are often used for street photography and photojournalism, as well as for travel, landscapes, and architectural photography. (A handful of Tilt-Shift wide-angle lenses are designed especially for architecture photography, but they are expensive; a more affordable alternative is to fix distorted lines in architectural shots in Photoshop, but that’s a separate article.)
Increased Creativity with Standard Wide Angle Lenses
Standard wide-angle lenses can open many creative opportunities as you travel and explore the world around you. If you enjoy photographing landscapes, standard wide-angle lenses have the smallest level of distortion of any kind of wide angle lens. That makes it easier to use a standard wide-angle lens than other types for stitching panoramas.
As you shoot, pay close attention to how the edges of the frame look. If you’re unhappy with the distortion, take a step back or zoom in a little bit for a less distorted view.
Technical Issues to Consider with Standard Wide Angle Lenses
While they won’t have as much chromatic aberration as something like a full-frame fisheye lens, many wide-angle lenses do have some issues with color fringing. They also produce stronger distortion effects in the corners and edges of the frame.
Selected Standard Wide-Angle Lenses for MILCs
- Fujifilm XF 23mm f/1.4R
- Leica Summicron-T 23mm f/2
- Olympus M Zuiko Digital 17mm f/1.8
- Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 Lumix II
- Sony Carl Zeiss 24mm f/1.8 E-Mount NEX-Series lens
Selected Standard Wide-Angle Zoom Lenses for DSLRs
- Canon EF 35mm f/2 IS USM
- Canon EF 35mm f/1.4 II USM
- Nikon 24mm f/1.8G AF-S ED
- Nikon 35mm f/1.8G
- Yongnou 35mm f/2 MC Lens for Canon
Ultra Wide Angle Lens
Ultra wide-angle lenses take in a much wider angle of view, and are in the 10-24mm focal length range. There are specific individual lenses, but you are more likely to find zoom lenses that cover this range.
Ultra wide angle lens uses:
The shortest of these lenses are almost fisheyes, and you can have fun with the proximity distortion that is their trademark. These are great lenses for eye-catching travel photography photos, and to a lesser extent, may be used by photojournalists working in tight quarters.
Choosing the Best Ultra Wide Angle Lens for You
As you shop for ultra-wide-angle lenses, you’ll notice a large price difference between top-of-the-line and introductory lenses. Many photographers require extremely precise lens elements in any lens they use, so they prefer to spend a bit more money to avoid chromatic aberration and soft focus on the edges of the frame.
If you’re just getting started with wide-angle lenses or you like a more analog, toy-lens look, check out some of the more budget-friendly options made with lower-quality glass. You can still achieve some very innovative shots even with an introductory lens.
Helpful Features to Consider
If you really want high-end wide-angle images, look for lenses with advanced autofocus systems, image stabilization, and multiple lens coatings for combatting aberration and fringing. Many third-party lens manufacturers have some fantastic options for common lens mounts like Nikon F mount, EF mount for Canon EOS, and Sony E mount.
Selected Ultra Wide-Angle Lenses for MILCs
Selected Ultra Wide-Angle Lenses for APS DSLRs
Selected Ultra Wide-Angle Lenses for 35mm DSLRs
Wide Angle Lens vs Fisheye Lens
There are several key similarities and differences between a wide angle lens and a fisheye lens. It helps to remember that they’re similar but not interchangeable. A fisheye lens is a wide angle lens, but not all wide angle lenses are fisheyes.
Wide angle lenses are versatile and useful. If your goal is to achieve a wide field of view with minimal distortion, then you may want to consider a wide angle lens. You can show full scenes, tall buildings, and large groups of people without curved lines or image distortion.
If a creative perspective is your goal, a fisheye lens will achieve all the same things as a wide angle lens. But it will also create an interesting and unique look with curvature and distortion. Fisheye lenses are far less versatile, but they can still be really fun and produce some fabulous images.
