As a portrait photographer, I tend to avoid ultra-wide lenses like I avoid crowds in flu season. But when Sony introduced the first native E-mount fisheye, I felt strangely inspired to combine my favorite photography genre – portraits – with the wild world of a lens that can see in 180°.
The Sony FE 8-14mm f/3.5 Fisheye G captures an unusually wide 180° view, creating the classic circular "fisheye lens look" at 8mm but filling the frame and still getting that classic fisheye distortion at 14mm.
Portraits are perhaps an unusual genre – though certainly not unheard of – for a fisheye. But, inspired by the wacky perspective, I wanted to shoot in an equally wild location.
Grabbing the new 8-14mm f/3.5 Fisheye G and the Sony A7 V, I drove to the most colorful location I could think of and headed to a brightly-colored mural painted across a set of silos.
The mural, Shine Bright Saginaw, is actually the second-largest in the US, painted by Okuda San Miguel along with a team of local artists.
I was drawn to the location by both its size and wild colors – after all, why shoot with a 180° lens without an oversized scene?
Fisheye lenses embrace the barrel distortion of an ultra-wide view, rather than trying to correct that “imperfection.” Straight lines warp into a curve and, when angled just right, the lens creates almost what looks like the reverse of a 360 camera’s “tiny planet” effect.
Along with embracing barrel distortion, the 180° view succumbs to a lot of perspective distortion – but when used appropriately, that distortion can create kooky images that feel more fun than warped.
Anything up close to the lens will look far larger than anything even just slightly farther away. The 8-14mm f/3.5 Fisheye G can shoot as close as 150mm / 5.91 inches, so there’s plenty of room for exaggerating that fisheye look by getting in close.
Fitting a 180° view into one frame is a challenge in that there’s very little ability to crop any distractions out of the scene.
I had to be careful posing and angling the camera to embrace the distortion where I wanted but not where I didn’t. I also had to be careful not to get my own feet in the frame, as 8mm is so wide that even the lens hood will show in the shot.
Aside from resisting the itch to clone out background litter, I didn’t even feel like I had to edit the photos – the images here are all JPEGs. (The header image has a black border added, as a 16:9 will crop into the circle – something for videographers to take note of.)
I’m a portrait photographer whose 50mm – which has a 75mm equivalent look on my APS-C camera – rarely ever leaves my mirrorless body. But shooting with Sony’s first E-mount fisheye was a lot more fun than I expected.
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