This effect is commonly made with a fisheye lens, which captures an extremely wide angle and creates the curved distortion seen around the edges of the image. Fisheye lenses are specialized ultra-wide lenses and are often easy to recognize by their bulbous front element.

You may not need a fisheye lens, though. A similar globe-like result can also be created by shooting multiple images and stitching them together in software such as Photoshop to form a panoramic view, then presenting it as a “tiny planet” style image.

So the two main routes are:

• use a fisheye lens for strong curved wide-angle distortion
• shoot several frames and stitch them into a panorama, then convert it into a globe-style image