Fish-eye lenses are really fun to use, but for most photographers are something that you would use only rarely. I recently had the opportunity to use the amazing EF 8-15mm f/4L USM fish-eye zoom lens. On a full-frame camera this lens produces a characteristic circular image and you need to take care not to get your feet or the legs of your tripod in the shot. 180 degrees angel of view makes this a specialist lens and the circular images at 8mm often need a little explanation to less well informed photographers.

I was looking for some images from the shoot with the fish-eye lens in my Lightroom catalogue, and thought I’d mistakenly not taken any shots at the 8mm setting. Searching metadata for images with the 8-15mm lens and a focal length of 8mm revealed no circular images, something fishy was going on!

It was only when I looked in to the develop module at the lens corrections panel that I realised that lens corrections were being applied, and rather than a subtle correction, it was a dramatic fish-eye to rectangular correction that was happening.

As soon as the lens correction was turned off, I saw the expected circular image I was expecting.

Lens corrections are a good thing in the main, but remember it is always worth seeing if the correction is actually helping your image, and it’s a simple thing to toggle lens corrections to see the difference.

 

About the author

Full-time photo tutor and photographer. I love to share my knowledge and skills to make photos, videos and teach others. I write books and articles for photo magazines and I always have at least one Speedlite flash in my camera bag