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Fish Eye Lenses
Nikon D7500 , Nikkor 16 mm 2.8 Fish Eye, full-frame
f/11, 1/100 sec, ISO 800, manual mode, freehand
On Madagascar you can try your hand at photography – there are more than enough motifs, given the extreme biodiversity of the island. Today we would like to introduce photography with special lenses like the Fish Eye. The Fish Eye lens is an ultra-wide-angle lens with strong barrel distortion. With this special lens you can take close-ups of animals, for example, and at the same time capture the natural environment. But you can also present the animal itself from a very unusual perspective.
The pictured photo of a leaf-tailed gecko, Uroplatus giganteus, was taken in the Amber Mountain National Park. Fortunately, the giant gecko was a very good-natured and patient subject! The exact focusing in the close range was a bit difficult here, so manual focus was used. The shutter speed was set at 1/100 so that the last sunrays of the day could still be caught on the moss of the tree. To get maximum sharpness of the gecko, the aperture was set at 11. Since it is relatively dark in the rainforest as opposed to photography in the sun, the ISO had to be set a little higher than usual.
The above-mentioned settings alone would result in the tree trunk being well lit, but the gecko in the foreground – on whose body no sunlight falls – would be underexposed in the shade. Therefore an unleashed flash with a softbox attached was used to give the leaf-tailed gecko the necessary quantum of light. The result is a photo in which both the main motif and its habitat are well illuminated. The sun’s rays set accents that bring the image to life, but Fish Eye lenses also have a few disadvantages such as chromatic aberration (lateral chromatic aberration). These must be corrected later in an image processing program like Adobe Lightroom with a few clicks. Due to the extreme wide-angle, it also happens very quickly that your own feet, flash, or other unwanted motifs suddenly appear in the image. The use of this lens is therefore something that needs to be practiced, but it’s also a lot of fun!
