Category Archives: Software

Canon 15mm Fisheye lens – Part I

Lenses, Software

Not just a throwback to the sixties

Update November 2009: ImageAlign is out of business and the plugin described here is no longer available. However, something every bit as good is available. It’s called PTLens and you can read about it here. Lightroom3 also now includes ‘defishing’ controls.

The lengthy list of things best forgotten from the 1960s includes long hair, bad music, revolting students …. and done-to-death fisheye lens images. So you can imagine there was no way on earth I would ever contemplate buying one of these gimmicks.

Yet here was the latest addition to my little outfit yesterday:

Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon f/2.8 Fisheye lens

A while back I wrote of the stroke of luck I had when I bumped into a fellow Canon DSLR user at Hearst Castle; he was nice enough to let me take a couple of snaps with his super exotic 14mm f/2.8 ‘L’ lens on my 5D body. This was mightily impressive, the creative opportunities legion, but at some $1,800 for the occasional superwide snap I decided I preferred to keep bread on the table. But that super-duper wide angle view stuck in my mind.

With my standard lens on the 5D being the wonderful 24-105mm zoom, a 20mm, the next widest lens, made little sense. The difference between 20mm and 24mm is not all that great, and I felt pretty happy with the 24mm setting on the zoom. Plus I did not want the bulk of a wide zoom lens. Then I found myself thinking about image correction and how much more of this sort of thing is increasingly being done in processing rather than with the camera’s software. Sharpening, exposure, contrast even lens aberrations can be repaired in Photoshop CS2 and Aperture.

Wait a minute! Lens aberrations? Well, couldn’t you take a cheap fisheye and remove the native barrel distortion, giving you something seriously wide at modest cost? So I typed ‘lens distortion correction’ into Google and one of the first results was for a New Zealand (New Zealand?) company named Grasshopper. Turns out they sell a Photoshop Plug-in named ImageAlign so I did a spot of reading which disclosed that this was a natural match for any number of fisheye lenses out there, making straight that which would otherwise be curved. So I plonked down $650 for the Canon fisheye and took a couple of snaps. No way was Photoshop CS2 able to straighten the curves with its modest range of corrections, so I downloaded the trial version of ImageAlign and, hey presto!, straight lines. So another $79 saw me equipped with what is, in effect, a 12mm wide angle after corrections are applied.

Read that again. A 12mm wide angle full frame lens.

August 2008 update: Grasshopper seems to be out of business but the features of ImageAlign described here are now available in Photoshop CS3.

How does it all work? Well, first you have to overcome the bout of vertigo you get from using a fisheye – a new experience for me. (The fisheye, not the vertigo – I get that every tax day already). Then you have to watch out that you don’t photograph your toes or shadow. Easier said than done. The fisheye fills the frame with its image on the 5D and is very, very wide indeed. Don’t even think of using this lens on a non-full frame sensor camera as your fisheye becomes a 24mm wide, so you might as well buy the equivalent lens (a 15mm non-fish on a 1.6x body) to get straight lines in the first place. But you cannot get this wide with anything except a full frame camera. A 1.6x sensor needs a 7.5mm lens to get this wide and they do not exist.

You then load the picture into Photoshop CS2 where the Grasshopper plug-in appears under the ‘Filter’ menu. The interface is everything that Photoshop is not – simple, intuitive and fast. Here is what you see:

Now to get the curves dead straight, you crank in 180 (max) barrel correction:

Almost straight, but not quite. Save this and crank in another 86 degrees of barrel correction:

Now things are straight. It only remains to remove the half moons top and bottom by dialing the Rescale slider to 16 and you are done:

Note that in the conversion nothing is lost from the center top and base, but some corner details disappear. That’s distortion correction for you.

How wide exactly is this combination? Well, suffice it to say that every self-respecting realtor should own one of these. Here’s the main corridor in our home with the 24-105mm at 24mm and with the fisheye:

And here is the fisheye version after correction with ImageAlign:

See what I mean? The price of the old estate just doubled.

It should be added that this lens is not easy to use. You don’t have to get close. You have to get intimate with your subject. Not for nothing does this lens focus down to a few inches. Rumor has it that Canon has not changed this lens in twenty years, and I can’t blame them. Edge definition is far superior to the 14mm that I used and while the little focus motor makes a whirring sound, the focus throw is so short that this is simply not an issue. The 14mm ‘L’ lens is silent, by comparison, and weighs twice as much. It also costs three times as much. No one ever said that silence was cheap.

Canon provides a metal lens cap, which is a shame. Plastic, as supplied with the 14mm, resists scratches and knocks far better. And, for once, you have to keep the stupid lens cap with you as there’s no way to protect the front element with a filter.

In practice, I kept feeling that I was looking at Van Gogh’s Yellow Chair or any one of a number of Bonnard paintings, so tilted is the perspective. You can get some sense of this from a few snaps I took down the road at the Cambria Pines Lodge, whose grounds include a beautiful garden, by clicking here. Some of these snaps are corrected with ImageAlign, some are left native where the distortion does not detract.

One other thing to note is that it makes sense to bracket exposure if in doubt. Digital sensors really seem to hate overexposure, reminiscent of slide film, so you want to preserve detail in the highlights and adjust the shadows later when processing. And chances are that you will have a huge contrast range outdoors owing to the enormous field of view of the fisheye. The last picture in the attached slide show, which is the interior of the Lodge’s Lounge, was taken at the fisheye’s full aperture at 1/20th second, with ISO dialled up to 1600, hand held. The glass of wine I had just enjoyed, visible in the foreground, served in lieu of a tripod. Is it sharp? The 13″ x 19″ print lying on my desk would make your eyes pop.

So there you have it – the widest rectilinear DSLR wide angle lens in the world, with absoutely no discernible vignetting, for some $650. Try it. You might like it. Yes, I know there’s a 12mm Voigtlander lens for film cameras, but before you spring for it and its extreme vignetting and poor resolution, let me remind you that Film is Dead.

Cambria Pines Lodge garden. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm Canon Fisheye, sepia toned in Aperture

Part II of this review appears here.

Image processing

Software

That’s digital workflow to you.

I did a fair bit of corresponding with people much more experienced with digital photography than I am, which is to say just about every photographer I know, asking how they manage the work flow for an efficient, low risk result.

Not surprisingly, the range of responses was about as broad as the styles of the photographers I spoke with. As with any mechanical process, workers will cast around empirically until something that feels right comes along.

My picture throughput is, I suppose, of two types. There are family pictures sent to me by one and all for eventual publication on the family web site. These arrive in hard copy, as film or slides, on CDs or by email. Generally of low resolution, and not much is needed for web publication, they get dropped into a current quarter album in iPhoto ‘06, are culled and sorted at quarter’s end, then crafted into web pages using the File->Export->Better HTML plug-in for iPhoto, all of it taking less time to do than to explain. After adding titles and dates, upload to the ISP using Transmit takes no time at all. A few seconds more and the menus on the site are updated for the latest quarter. This efficient routine has taken the drudgery out of the process and makes sharing the family site with all and sundry a lot of fun.

The other type of picture I have to process is my own ‘serious’ work. Stated differently, these are the snaps whose primary goal is large, framed, wall hanging prints, anywhere from 8” x 10” up. These fill up the walls at the old manse as well as making nice gifts for friends. The originals are scans from 35mm, medium format or 4” x 5” negatives or, increasingly, RAW or JPG images from the Canon EOS 5D. With all of the medium format gear sold and most of the 35mm equipment now gracing collectors’ cabinets in Japan, that leaves 200 mB large format scans and 4-12 mB JPG or RAW digital files to contend with. As iPhoto is immensely capable, handling even the recent CR2 Canon RAW format with aplomb, these get dumped into thematic directories therein (landscapes, forests, etc.) and, once culled, a double click opens the images in Photoshop CS2 as a native file or, in the case of RAW, in Adobe Camera Raw. Whatever processing is required is performed and the images are then saved to the iMac’s desktop and printed.

These desktop high quality files are then dropped into Extensis Portfolio 7 (now 8, but I have not bothered to upgrade), keywords are added to each, and the whole thing is backed up automatically overnight. Given the amount of time and effort expended through this point, a comprehensive back-up strategy is vital. The cost in light of the risk of loss is negligible. My back-up approach is three pronged. First, duplicates of the good personal pictures appear in iPhoto and Extensis libraries, albeit on the same disk drive. Second, at midnight the iMac’s internal hard disk is incrementally backed-up to an external LaCie Firewire hard drive. This is a bootable back-up with the full OS X Tiger operating system resident on the external drive, allowing me to boot from that drive in the event the internal disc in the iMac fails. The iPhoto and Extensis libraries do not reside on the iMac’s internal drive. Rather, they are stored on a second external LaCie Firewire drive, this a 250 gB monster, which in turn backs up incrementally to a third external 250 gB LaCie.

As backing up is even less exciting than doing your tax return and certainly easier to forget, an application named SuperDuper! takes care of the chore daily and automatically. It’s the first back-up application for the Mac that speaks to you in English rather than Geek and works perfectly. Ever the Doubting Thomas, I check the ‘bootability’ of the external drive monthly and compare the files sizes on the two 250 gB Lacies weekly to see that they remain identical.

Now my iPhoto ‘06/Portfolio 7 strategy may not be suitable for those taking a lot of pictures. but for the 500 or so family snaps and 200 or so personal pictures I reckon on saving annually, it’s fine for me. I confess I was tempted by Apple’s Aperture as a Swiss Army Knife solution for everything, but my research suggests that the application is far from debugged in its first version and needs a top of the line Mac computer to make it run at acceptable speed. As I have no intention of blowing five grand on the latter, Aperture can wait. I still think Photoshop has one of the worst interfaces known to Man (if not Geek), but Adobe Camera Raw for RAW files goes a long way to simplifying things. The folks at Adobe really need to take a look at iPhoto for user interface design.

I tried Adobe’s free beta release of Lightroom (I challenge you to find it on Adobe’s web site) which has a nice look and feel stolen from Aperture. However, it is so slow in loading larger files on my iMac G5 as to be unusable. I would dearly love to drop the duplication resulting from using Portfolio 7, but as Apple has had some complaints about stability in iPhoto (though I have had no issues) I remain committed to the belt and (two sets of) suspenders approach until I can be convinced otherwise.

There seems to be a growing number of external RAW processors and sharpeners out there which plug-in to Photoshop, as if that application needed any more menu items. While I let others do my testing for me, everything I have read (after discounting the fact that 90% of what’s out there is nothing more than a paid endorsement) suggests that the native code in Photoshop CS2 is as good or better than the after-market variants. For me that means RAW conversion, curves, levels and unsharp masking, which is about all I ever use in CS2. Dust removal? A thing of the past with digital images.

Stumbling about

Photographers, Software

Visit twenty new photography sites daily

One of the great frustrations of finding new photography on the internet is not knowing where to look.

You read about a site here, a friend recommends one there, in other words pure serendipity.

Now the StumbleUpon tool may not remove the random chance aspect of the search, but it does at least make finding new work easy …. and enthralling. The tool plugs into the Firefox browser and appears in a menu bar like so:

If you don’t use Firefox you can download it free from the web. Mine runs on an Apple and it may even run on a Windows PC, though candidly I couldn’t care less whether it does or not as I do not care to use the deeply flawed Microsoft operating system. I prefer something that does not constantly lock up.

The picture above is a screenshot of Firefox from my iMac. Download the tool (http://www.stumbleupon.com/), tell it you are interested in Photography and then click on the ‘Stumble!’ icon. You are taken to a random photography oriented web site. Click again and another site pops up. The rate of repetition is very low, so if you see something you like be sure to bookmark it.

Sites vary but the ratio seems to be about 80% photography: 20% technical instruction.

Every time I have Firefox on the screen I find myself heading for the Stumble! icon and discover wonderful images on many talented photographers’ web sites.