Saturday, August 10, 2019

It pays to remember what you have previously bought!

Recently I have spent a lot of time ensuring my various cameras (5D3, EoSMs, EoSM3, G1X and G7X) can run my auto exposure and focus bracketing scripts.
 

But what if you haven't got CHDK or Magic Lantern running on your camera, ie you're not a Canon shooter? What if you are a Canon shooter but have manual lenses?
 

Well, all is not lost as we will see in this post.

As we know, shooting wide allows us to shoot close, albeit with some distortion, unless you use quality lenses. For example, my Irix 11mm f/4 lens has a 126° full frame, diagonal field of view without any noticeable distortions. But can I go wider?

The answer is, of course, yes. But now we need to explore fisheye lenses.

Luckly, I remembered, as I haven't used it for nearly five years, I have a 12mm, full frame, Rokinon Fisheye; which has a 180 degree field of view.

So I thought I would do a quick experiment, using my EoSM3, with an EFM-EOS adapter.

I used my M3 CHDK script to capture two exposures (a base ETTR and a +4Ev one for the shadows). I set the lens aperture to F/8 and focused at the hyperfocal, using the depth of field scale (having confirmed it was calibrated OK).

Having taken one set of exposures at the hyperfocal, I then took two more sets so I had three, contiguous focus brackets. That is six images in all.

I ingested these into Lightroom and used the LR HDR merge to create three HDR focus brackets, which I defringed and corrected for exposure.

I then did a round trip to Helicon Focus and ended up with this image:



I then did a round trip to Photoshop, where I used Fisheye Hemi to correct for the verticals, giving me this final image, after tweaking a little more in LR


Bottom line: I don't think you can beat the Rokinon 12mm Fisheye for quality at a low price.

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