I picked up a Bower 8mm fisheye lens the other day and took it on a couple test runs. So far, from a video perspective, I’m more than impressed with this lens. It’s very wide and very well constructed. I feel like this thing can take a solid beating.
I don’t have a lot of experience with professional still photography, but in my opinion, this lens is great in that realm too. It’s very sharp and produces some great color. The biggest flaw that I’ve noticed is some slight chromatic aberration around the edges at full res but once the image is scaled down, it looks fine. It flares up quite a bit when pointed directly at the sun, but I’m guessing that’s normal.
It was $400 with a really good insurance plan. I’m counting on this lens getting hit by a board at some point, so the insurance is nice. Can anybody compare the Bower to the Samyang and Sigma counterparts? I’d love to know the difference between the three.
Video starring: Brett Abramsky, Jed Shooter, Sturgil Horn
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Looks good to me. I’ll probably get one for the 550D I plan on getting whenever that comes out.
ive had the 7d/bower combo for a little while now. ive had nothing but awesome results from it. well well worth the money for sure. ive had several times when the lens was almost too wide and i caught my foot or something in the shot mistakingly. love this lens.
Temp: good call. Im pretty sure I’m getting that camera too.
Brett: yeah the thing is really wide. It’s awesome, it feels like I’m filming with an sd cam + century lens.
For filming is pretty sick, the clip looks awesome, but for photos I think it’s not so sharp, i mean check this shot i made with a tokina 10-17mm on a nikon d60: http://www.flickr.com/photos/serskater/3742117717/sizes/l/in/set-72157607689990168/
It was at natural light.
This is just my opinion.
Seggio: it says that the image is private
fisheye looks good. So when are you writing that article about post production?
Video looks good, however, I will have to agree the photos are fairly disappointing. I’m thinking that the optics are simply not able to resolve 18mp worth of data, but for video it seems to handle it just fine. Of course I’m judging this based on photographs coming from the tokina and nikon fisheyes. Not much of a fair comparison I assume.
Joe: Yeah I’ve read similar stuff around the internet. It doesn’t concern me too much, because it produces amazing looking video footage, and I don’t mind the softness of it for high-res photos. It reminds me of working with film.
Danny: I plan on writing a lot of articles in that realm, and they’ll come whenever I get some time after work. Thanks for the interest though, that motivates me to get some content up quicker.
Sorry man, here it is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/serskater/4377263194/in/set-72157607689990168/ it should work.
Heres a quick clip that I shot on the 7d/bower combo. I used the Manfrotto Fig rig. It was mainly to serve as a short test for the Fig setup. http://vimeo.com/9641075
http://vimeo.com/10476518 Durham footy party.