modusoptimus

A classical view of Hong Kong from Victoria Peak:

I managed to get a picture of my room before throwing all my stuff around. It was taken with the 16mm fisheye and “defished” with Fisheye Hemi.

This weekend I got a 16 mm fisheye lens. This leans is really wide; I have to pay attention so that my feet do not appear in the picture.

While the fisheye is not particularly suited for architecture, I use Hugin (open source GUI on top of panorama tools) to “defish” the images. The rectilinear projection (a standard lens is rectilinear) yields and horizontal angle of view of 129° (this is way too much for a rectilinear projection, usually limited to 120°) and a vertical angle of view of 86°. This is the equivalent of a rectilinear lens with a focal length of 8.5 mm horizontally and 13 mm vertically. Of course the 3/2 image ratio is not respected anymore, the corners are somehow soft due to extreme stretching and the objects on the sides have a crazy perspective, but these angles of view are so extreme that it opens a lot of possibilities.

I have to explore more on different projections and find a projection somewhere between the fisheye (too curvy) and rectilinear (too much perspective distortion).