The fisheye lens is one of the strangest and funniest that we can buy for our camera . It is not exactly the first lens that we would choose as a basic lens, since we will not be able to take a single "normal" photo with it. But they are relatively cheap lenses (you can find some very basic ones for just 50 euros) , so it can be a whim to play with the camera in a different way.
A fisheye is a lens so angular that it circularly warps the image. We normally find them of two types. On the one hand, in the range of 15 -17 millimeters, and in the 8-millimeter range. With the former we obtain a somewhat distorted image, which covers more than with a normal angle and provides interesting effects. However, the image is rectangular.
Those around the eight millimeters are more "radical". The image is so distorted that it seems that we have taken a photo of a crystal ball. Also, the corners will appear black in the photo , as the image returned from the lens to the sensor is not large enough to fill the sensor.
It is not the purpose with which we would take photos of a wedding, but it has some very interesting uses. It is a different way of approaching some realities, and it combines especially well with compositions that have many straight lines, since the effect is appreciated more strongly.
One of the few “commercial” uses for this lens is small space photography. It is easy to find these types of photos when we look for a floor or images of the interior of a car. And is that thanks to the enormous angle, we can show many elements that normally would not fit in a single photo.
It's also a good idea to use fisheye for building photography . Taking architectural photos is not easy at all and we usually run into two problems: almost all the photos of a famous building are already taken and are highly visible, and if the building is large it may simply not appear in the photo unless we let's get very far.
With a fisheye we can give a very different perspective to any building, taking into account the aberrations that are going to be introduced into the image . It will change shape, the area covered in the photo will expand and it may even appear to be built on the planet Kaio from Dragon Ball.
The other most common use is portraits . It is a different way of taking photos of people, although it requires a bit of trust with the person portrayed, and if we do not want the face to be lost in a huge landscape photo we will have to approach a few centimeters from the face. Or move away a bit and win a much more original "selfie".
The possibilities are varied and depend, like almost everything, on the imagination that we throw at it. It's a cheap way to experiment in the world of photography and offers a very different and somewhat psychedelic view of reality.