Why doesn’t a screw-on fisheye adapter look fisheye on my APS-C Nikon with an 18–105mm lens?
Asked 2/26/2014
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I tried a Spiratone/Soligor/Kenko screw-on fisheye adapter on a Nikon APS-C DSLR using an 18–105mm lens with a step-up ring. Even at 18mm, the photos don’t show the strong fisheye look I expected. Is this because of the APS-C crop sensor, the zoom lens, or the adapter itself? If I use the adapter on a Nikon 35mm f/1.8G with the correct ring, would the fisheye effect be more obvious?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
12y ago
2 Answers
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Let's think about what's happening here. The adapter essentially reduces the focal length by about 60%, giving a wider field of view. It's an oversimplification, but let's stick with it for brevity.
Say you have a prime lens with a fixed focal length of 50mm. With the adapter in place, it now has the field of view equivalent to a 20mm lens.
With your lens, that 18mm lens has a field of view of around an 8mm. Definitely fisheye territory.
However, you also have to factor in the crop sensor. This increases the effective focal length by about 50%. Your 8mm? That's now 12mm. Wide angle, certainly, but perhaps not the extreme fisheye distortion you expect.
As you zoom in, the effect will decrease. There's literally no point using these adaptors at anything other than the first few millimetres of the lens since you gain nothing you can't do with your lens normally, while sacrificing image quality.
With the 35mm lens, you will land up with the equivalent of around 21mm focal length. So to directly answer your question: No, it is not going to give you any fisheye distortion on that lens.
I have presumed the one you bought is the 0.43x converter, which is the first one a cursory Google search turns up. To work out the effective focal length, you take the lens focal length, multiply it by whatever magnification it is, and then multiply it by 1.5 to take the crop sensor into account. Again, oversimplifying it a bit, but essentially the lower the number you get, the wider the field of view becomes - you will need to be sub-10mm to get close to the fisheye effect you want.
Originally by user26368. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user26368
12y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
A screw-on fisheye adapter is basically a wide-angle converter: it shortens the effective focal length and widens the field of view. But on an APS-C camera, the smaller sensor crops that wider image, so the fisheye look is reduced compared with full frame.
On your 18–105mm, the adapter will have the strongest effect only at the widest end. As you zoom in, the fisheye effect quickly drops off, so using it beyond the first few millimeters of zoom is usually not very useful.
Your 35mm lens is less likely to give a dramatic fisheye result than 18mm, because it starts from a narrower field of view. The adapter may make it wider, but not necessarily into obvious fisheye territory on APS-C.
So yes, APS-C crop is part of the reason, but the bigger issue is that these adapters depend heavily on the lens focal length and work best on very wide settings. If you want a strong fisheye effect, a dedicated fisheye lens is much more reliable than a front-mounted adapter.
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