FISHEYE PHOTOGRAPHY, and the Fish-eye-Takumar 17mm f4. Review with many photos/ideas/comparisons.
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- Опубліковано 5 сер 2024
- Here are links to the different sections:
00:00 Introduction
00:20 Fisheye photography - fun and creativity
02:50 Fish-eye-Takumar 17mm f4 overview
06:40 Black and white fisheye photos
07:35 Colours and rendering
00:83 Flares
09:23 Sharpness
11:26 Crop Sensor - comparing the Takumar to a digital kit lens
15:00 Full Frame Sensor - comparing the Takumar to a digital fisheye
17:59 Prices and value for money
18:40 Conclusions on the Takumar's plus points - Наука та технологія
I was extremely lucky to purchase this lens at the local thrift store for only $1.99 in near mint condition. What a fun lens to use
My jeakousy levels are high right now.
Incredibly informative video - thank you very much.
I love that shot of the chess pieces. Never thought I needed a fisheye before.😉
Great lens review - as always. The sample images were especially helpful. Fisheye can be the right choice if you are after something different. However, I equally appreciated the images where you had deliberately minimised the distortion. For me I'd prefer an ultra-wide lens. The built-in red filter really brought out the sky and clouds and reminded me to use colored filters when shooting black & white.
Glad I stumbled upon your channel today. Enjoying all the Takumar Reviews
very good shot
Thank you for such a detailed review!
Congratulations on the work! I love your videos about old lenses, vintages etc. They are very good! I'm a photographer and I often prefer to use the old, classic lenses. And I'm rediscovering a lot by watching your reviews. And I want to use them not only in photography, but also in films. Short and medium films.
I love fisheye lenses, I've got 2 different ones for my Fujifilm crop sensor camera. One rectilinear fisheye, the other a circular fisheye.
Both are relatively cheap but I love the type of images that can be made with it. I like the challenge of "hiding" the fisheye effect so it looks like ultra wide angle... But I also like the circular effect of the circular fisheye. 😃
One day I must try one of the circular fisheye attachments I've seen for sale....
Informative, concise and well organized video as usual. I myself own several ultra wide and fish eye lenses and after watching this video I feel inspired to shoot with them again! Thank you Simon.
Thank you!
Thankk you soooo much for all of this info
Thank you for the video. Fisheye lenses are very often shown as creative tools with stylized images which can be loved/hated depending on who you ask. I have used in the past the Tokina fisheye zoom, which is the same optics as the Pentax. I used it in a seemingly unique way, to avoid the stretching of people on the edges in wide angle close space event photos. I liked the less fishy zoomed in look and the people looked better in the photos. I would often use a plugin to correct the vertical lines but leaving the image shapes, like face shapes, mostly unchanged. Then I got a Rokinon stereographic fisheye and was even more pleased as this lens design keeps round objects round anywhere in the frame and therefore doesnt bulge in the centre and squeeze at the edges like many normal orthographic fisheye designs. I am still a fan of stereographic design and have another Samyang 12mm f2.8 for this, but I rarely use it sadly. I hope others discover stereographic as it gives a wider yet more natural looking image than the 'bulge & squeeze' fisheyes of old. Still, stereographic remains mostly unknown and hardly exploited, even without mention in a fisheye video.
Lovely picture of Burlington House. It reminds me of the guy with a field camera who was there when I visited, spending half an hour trying to get the lines all parallel.
Thanks for these videos. I've been taking snapshots for a couple decades and am finally getting decent. Videos like this are a huge help. Probably going to get a nice older Pentax now. Wish there was an adapter to collect digital images in the older cameras. Film is so cumbersome. Love it tho. Used to be able to develop it myself. I was a young man then tho.
Do I like those flares? No... I love them!! Also, love what you did with the Black and White images. Really nice.
Thank you!
I too find that my photos from my digital cams, are too sharp. Sometimes I dumb them down, but then I am back to shooting film. Good stuff Simon!
A fascinating video. Your photos with the Tak are wonderful. I've been experimenting lately with a red 29 filter on a 40mm Rokinon lens, and agree that it is fun to process the images for black and white. The images seem to be more well-defined and contrasty, due to the filter's haze suppression property perhaps. Your video makes the fish-eye lens look very attractive, but I'm on a budget now and am considering the purchase of a Sony a7II, so I'll have to make do with the 45 lenses I currently have. ^^ Keep the great videos coming, Simon.
Many thanks for your kind words! The red filter is great - I'm not sure why we/I spent so long only trying a yellow filter. On fisheyes, I think the fisheye zooms are better value - where you get a fisheye look at one end, and a UWA look at the other. I got the DA 10-17mm because it was on sale at a great/low price. If you see one "cheap" it might be worth a try as its a lot of fun, even on FF sensors.
Using the red filter in that way is a really good idea. I have a Rollei/Zeiss F-Distagon 16mm f2.8 fisheye with similar built-in filters, filters which I've generally ignored, but I'm going to try that!
Great video which, apart from offering a lot of useful and enjoyable information about the Takumar, also acts as a reminder of how cool a lens the DA10-17 still is. BTW, the latter was actually a Pentax design by Jun Hirokawa and Takayuki Ito that was licenced to Tokina. Your sample photography in the video is both instructive and inspiring.
Thank you!
5 min into this film, I found myself saying out loud, "This is great!"
Simon
I have a number of Rokinon wide angle lenses which I carry at least one with me I have 8mm 3,5 fisheye , 14mm2.8 and the 20mm1.8 I use the fisheye for the distortion or ultra wide pictures it renders I like the 14mm for wide angle shots plus Milky Way photography and star bursts. My 20mm I use for low light photography and street photography.
whaat, built in filters in a Takumar lens? wow
I had a lovely K pentax 17mm f4 and I wish I hadnt sold it, but It was few and far between shots I made with that lens. I do however find a lot of joy with the K 18mm 3.5.
I found the fish-eye review interesting - I bought my DA 10-17 a month ago and then fell ill, so regrettably have not been able to use it. I will say though that your observations about the filters are very useful to know. When I shoot film it will be mostly monochrome but I do have a lot of intertesting filters to try and I will be sure to prioritise the red ones on those cameras.
One think that makes the Takumar Fisheye stand out: it's quite small. The only film Fisheye I have is my Dad's old Minolta Rokkor-OK 16mm f/2.8. A good lens, with neutral, orange, blue, and yellow filters, but really quite large. That Tak looks tiny.
As to APS-C, I never bother adapting the Rokkor, just because it isn't dramatic enough. That said, I've got a cheap little Pergear 10mm fisheye pancake, and that's quite fun every now and again.
Great review - thank you
Initially I had the DA10-17 on Crop and K1. Later I got the earlier non-SMC-Takumar with the same mechanical design of the one you tested. I found the hanling of the filter ring annoying because the front cover often miss-adjusted the ring and often I got pictures with vignietting by a filter half way in the picture. The non-SMC coating was not that good - nevertheless I liked the small size - it allways found a niche in my bag. Later I found the SMC-K-Version which is opitcally identical to the one you tested. The small ring-hood allows to put it front down on an table or - more important - put ist straight on a window/glas suface to shoot through and minimize reflections.
Further the filter ring is well protected against miss-adjustent and inclused Skylight and B81 filters too. For me this is the version to go for!
Btw: even for my 6x7 I had to get the 35/4.5 Fisheye
Thanks for this response, and also for the feedback on the filter ring issues - which I've seen another owner has experienced too. If I wasn't a Takumar collector and had more money, I'd probably go for the SMC K version. All my K series primes have been excellent (even though I sold the K 85mm f1.8 in a moment of madness)!
As always really nice video, i own this lens to, you forgot to mention the part on the back elements where you can add "filters" or "gels"
I like how compact it is in comparison with the SMC takumar 15mm F3.5.
I hope to find a cheap 17mm lens in the near future.
I have a question I have a Mir 1 Grand Prix old version it shows m39 Mount but and ordered an m39 ring and put in onto my m42 Mount. Still no movement.
Do you have any idea….what we be a good way to adapt to Cannon or Leica.
I do like the wide angle lenses, but they are getting Super Expensive
Great material 👏
I wonder how the Takumar 17mm compares to the Zenitar 16mm?
Takumara anti-reflective coatings will probably be better, although I did not have the opportunity to try the new Zenitar from the latest series.
Russian / Ukrainian lenses usually fare a bit worse against light (the exception is Helios 44m7), on the other hand they are usually extremely sharp. This is what my MIR 24N 2 / 35mm has - you have to be careful with it against the light, but its sharpness can exceed the Nikkor 2 / 35mm.
These built-in filters in Takumara are an amazing treat. With many fisheye lenses, the only way to attach the filter is to screw it on from the inside. To change the filter, you have to unscrew the lens each time.
It's a Japanese baby, it costs more than the brand new Zenitar 16mm straight from the Kiev Arsenal.
I have a dilemma what to buy;)
I love fisheye lenses but unless I have a reason for the distortion i'm going to use an ultrawide instead.
Fisheye lenses are the spice you use once in awhile for effect.
we miss your videos
I don't have the M42 version, but I have the K-mount version, which I think is similar (maybe has better coatings) and I love this lens (even made a video about using it for some film photos which I think turned out nice!). I adore the sunstars it can make too.
You are right that it is probably not worth the $$ when compared to newer fisheeye, unless like me you just want all the Pentax'es, but I do think it produces some really nice images for the dollar.
I did buy this lens more with my heart (as a Takumar collector) than my head, but it has produced a much higher number of good images than I anticipated!
I bought a Meike 6.5mm fisheye for my Fuji X-T30, costs just about 120-130 bucks. It gives you the full fisheye circle on the cropped sensor of the camera, if you want the raw fisheye experience. That thing has a field of view of 190 degrees, so it looks even a bit behind you. But this means you cannot use any kind of lens hood.
i just find one for less than 50 bucks in a flea market... i just love it
Some very nice photographs here. Trouble is, if I had a fish eye I would use it so infrequently that it would be an expensive luxury. Speaking of infrequent use, I have a Leica M240 and I bought four lenses. Experience has taught me that three of those lenses I use so infrequently they are almost superfluous.
If you are wondering, (I know I would) my 95% lens is the Summilux 50, maybe the best in the world. The ones I could leave behind and not miss are the 90 mm Summicron, the 35 mm Summicron and the 21 mm Elmar f3.8. The 35 mm was a particularly stupid buy.
Interesting and helpful feedback for anyone considering Leica. I'm sure others have made expensive buys with Leica lenses - trying to create a great set of different focal lengths, only to find they don't use some of the lenses very much My strategy for a lens like the fisheye is to use it non-stop for a couple of weeks or more, and that forces me to get to know it intimately. And then put it away...until a holiday or some other reason to get it out again.
Hmmm….I have a Leica CL with Thach I use a number of M42 mount lenses reviewed by Simon. I passed on the Tak fisheye as it was too expensive to justify. But ttartisans recently released a 7.5mm F2 fisheye with the L mount which I bought from China for for £125.99. It’s quite heavy but very well made. I’m taking Simons advice and have now installed it on the CL to make me use it!
As soon as you SEE the lens, you want it. At least, that was my case, I have the Pentax 10-17mm and, after this review (very balanced and fair), I am happy that I can make do with the zoom, although, I still crave the 17.
It's a fine looking lens! The 10-17mm was more than enough for me, but after earning some money from these videos I decided to try the 17mm. I use it more than I thought I would.
I use an EX Sigma 10-20mm autofocus DC lens on my full frame 35mm Canon 50e film camera. It vignets at 10-12mm but works very well from 13mm to 20mm without vignetting. (The EX lenses were designed for crop sensor digital cameras). It's rectilinear, sharp and contrasty. At 13mm it's very, very wide angle. I paid about $2000 for my 21mm Leica Elmarit F2.8 lens that I used on my M5 and M3 Leica film cameras, The Sigma lens cost about $600 and, if I'm honest, gives better results than the Leica. Of course the Leica lens was bought 30 years ago. At the time, it seemed amazing.
As always it comes to what kind of photographer are you , what are you looking for in picture. creativity or tehnical perfection. I really like feeling when handling vintage lense, that full sold metal feel. But for me personally sharpness and coating are far superior on modern lenses. So I found some middle ground in new Sigma DI Art line lenses. But I always when I go shooting I carry one or two M42 peaces whit me, simply can not depart from them :)
Simon, I got myself a copy of Fujinon 55mm 1,8 EBC, with Tokina 2x teleconverter for product shoots. I was surprised how well lens preform, it is permanent part of my product photography kit now. I got it thanks for your video suggestion, so thank you.
Sorry for long comment and thank you for videos, keep making them.
Thank you for your comments and it's always good to read about a successful recommendation!
your shots with the red filter seem infrared - saying that as someone who shoots a lot of IR. very interesting. i wonder if the k1 is particularly sensitive?
Thank you for the vid. although it has not convinced me to go purchase a fisheye lens, i can now say i have an idea of what to expect if i change my mind. In other news, have you ever considered doing a 'top ten coveted lenses'? your current collection is awesome. you do such a wonderful job in explaining your decisions, i thought it would be interesting to hear your perspective - or maybe your daydream - of the perfect lens set (if you've already done so i apologize for having missed the vid). whatever you do, enjoy it! thanks again!
Good idea! It's got me thinking about the perfect (in my dreams) lens set. A mix of zooms and primes. I'll give to more thought....
@@Simonsutak I look forward to seeing the ultimate lens set!
@@Simonsutak Another reason I asked the question is due to the fact you tend to enjoy educating your subs on lenses, but only the ones you own. Discussing lenses you don't own but want to try (and why) but might not get the opportunity to try for ourself anytime soon would give us a chance to learn about as yet unheard of opportunities. You might even convince a few subs to let you borrow more.
great point about the digital sharpness vs the softer vintage for black and white, when i use my sigma 56mm for efm for black and white portraits i often use quite a high iso in monochrome to both soften it and to add a pleasing soft grain.
I am a fan of the vintage lenses and have quite a few, this is one i will keep an eye out for, though i do have a dedicated efm fisheye in a 7.5mm, this will be a nice addition.
Are there alot of vintage m42's that came with or had special filters? would that warrant a separate video?
I'm not sure about other lenses with built-in or specialist filters...I'll do some research.
@@Simonsutak In Poland, where I live, in the 1960s, the "Janpol Color" enlarger lens was produced. He was created at the Warsaw Photographic Optical Works (WZFO). There were two versions of this lens - 5.6 / 55mm and 5.6 / 80mm. It has an M42 thread mount and an integrated color correction filter system. Constructively, it is the Anastygmatic Tessar.
You should not expect super image quality from this lens, but its price is ridiculous - even unused copies in factory packaging can be bought for 50 - 100 Polish zlotys - it is about 15 - 30 dollars.
I am going to buy this lens myself, out of pure curiosity, in terms of taking black and white photos with the use of these built-in filters.
The lens looks like this: ua-cam.com/video/w2YSDcTv3UE/v-deo.html
Here are the photos taken with this lens: www.flickr.com/photos/tags/janpol/page4
I bought a 8mm rokinon, and it's crazy wide... Like really wide, 13ft (~4m) tree can fit into viewfinder from less than 5ft (1.5m) distance. And I can't get used to it, but it's interesting and difficult to get interesting photos.
Thanks for an interesting video!, do all the fish-eye-takumars 17mm/f4 come with built in filters?, all of my searches tell nothing about such, bw
As far as I'm aware, there are two versions of this lens - the first Fish-Eye-Takumar and the Super-Multi-Coated version, and they both have built-in filters.
@@Simonsutak thanks! :)
There is a screw out part in the back of the len for filters!
I wonder who coined the term FISH EYE LENS first ? Because it stuck .
Pentax designed this lens in the later 1960s. Shortly thereafter, they issued the same design of lens for their medium format 6x7 system as a 35mm 4.0 fisheye, which I have and occasionally use.It is not sharp at the edges and into the corners of the image. I'd say they did the best they could with the types of optical glass and coatings available at the time. From my 6x7cm negative I can produce a very sharp 11x14 inch print, and a credible 16x20. IMO. to use the lens (and any fisheye) credibly, you must plan a specific shot which uses the fisheye distortion as part of the creative process. For example, the Pentax lenses being far less radical in design and optical effect than their Nikon brothers, if you have a straight line, say a horizon, in your image, you can place it across the center of the image to cancel the fisheye effect. The sky above shows no distortion, and the land-mass or water below the horizon, while distorted somewhat, will not show that unless there are rectilinear subjects, like buildings, there for reference. These two lenses were sold for decades, but they were never updated, I suppose because they served those who wanted their effect and sales volume didn't warrant the effort to redesign. By the way, as to the filters, the yellow filter is intended to modify the performance of panchromatic film tonal reproduction to better match reality. The red-orange filter is just a high contrast B&W filter. In the MF version, a warming filter for color use was added.
Well I just realized I paid full price for a flawed version of this lens… it’s weird because it is a fun motion-blur style effect it has at f4. But I didn’t think it was abnormal until I saw this review
That was taken in lisbon...
The Pentax F 17-28 fisheye zoom beats da 10-17 in almost everyway if you use FF camera like K1
Yes, good recommendation - I've read this elsewhere as well. My aim in the video was to use a digital, not film era lens for comparison.
good lens but it's flares are not great at all. as with most of single coated lenses it's flares have some "dusty" look being all of a same pale yellowish/blueish color.
i personally prefer "cinematic" look of a flares on multi coated lenses with green-blue-purple artifacts.
especially blues on Canon FD lenses with SSC (despite SSC suck on its main purpose)
Many my multi-coated version is a little better, but yes, the flares do look better in b&w sometimes.
First time hearing "Sony" pronounced with an "on" rather than "own". Are you attempting to pronounce it how the Japanese pronounce it? It's not a problem, I'm just curious.
No, this is just how I personally pronounced Sony over the years, but as I've found since posting videos, my pronunciations are sometimes wrong!
test
f4 ??? 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂