An extremely rare, and huge, collectable lens has become available to purchase, the Nikon fisheye 14.3mm f4.
The lens is available to buy from the Leica Store Lisse, in the Netherlands.
"We currently don't really have a price in mind yet, as we aren't officially putting it up for sale at this time. We are happy to have it in our collection ourselves! Although we never know what offers might come our way..." Martijn de Clercq from the Leica Store Lisse told DCW.
This museum-worthy, one-of-a-kind, lens is a piece of photography and optics history, and was originally made for Disney with plans to use it for futuristic film and theatre viewing with 360-degree screens.
Made by Nikon, the lens could be fitted to IMAX film cameras shooting onto 70mm film.
With some professional engineering, this lens can be adapted to attach to multiple modern cameras, including the Leica S, and Hasselblad XCD. Its speed of f4, which translates to f2.8 on 35mm can be considered ultra-fast for a fish-eye lens.
In the photo below, the giant lens is sat next to the Leica Noctilux 50mm f1.2, which takes a moment to even notice in comparison!
Described by Leica Store Lisse as “the holy grail of (fish eye) lenses,” they add, “Considering this lens is one of a kind vs the dozens of copies of the 6mm, features 70mm coverage vs 35mm of the 6mm, has a similarly ultra-fast aperture scaled up to 70mm, you can begin to understand the significance of what we have on our table today!”
Fisheye lenses date back to 1906, when inventor and physicist Robert W. Wood developed a lens based on how a fish would view the world underwater.
The lenses were used in the 1920s when they were used to study cloud formations, when they were known as whole-sky lenses, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the fisheye lens became more popular, and mass-produced.
Nikon released their first consumer fisheye lens in 1962 and the style of photography became synonymous with the swinging sixties. Many famous album covers were taken with fisheye lenses including Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Are You Experienced, and The Rolling Stones ‘Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass).
Check out our guide to the best fisheye lenses on the market. We've also put together our guide to the best Nikon lenses.
