[goatsNdonkey]

I just received my vintage Samigon Fisheye 180-Degree Aux Lens, recently glommed from the auction site, today, and after a bit of clean-up I mounted it on the front of my Sears (Ricoh) f/1.7 50mm. Setting up the combo according to the instructions inside of the Samigon's domed front lens cap, I mounted it on the front of my K110D dslr and took it out for some test shots. The smaller than full-35mm-frame sensor crops the tops and bottoms of what would be a full circle image, but that doesn't bother me much. In fact, I might prefer to keep a rectangular image. In any case, some of the first results, despite the very overcast day, looked interesting and fun.

Here's one of them. Saanen wether goat, Parmesan, is always a willing camera hog, while his Alpine brothers are more bashful:

[goatsNdonkey]

Here are three more from this afternoon. It's fun to see how fences bend and land and trees turn to taffy. And the donkey gets skinny:

[todd]

Spent a night in San Diego this weekend and wanted to go here (Sunset Cliffs) during photo light, but was busy in the evening then didn't end up going to bed until 3am with mid morning plans too, so had to make do with the middle of the day... DA10-17

10mm


11mm

[goatsNdonkey]

Great pictures, Todd!

[goatsNdonkey]

Starting to read this thread from the beginning, through posts like Todd's just now, it's hard not to be envious of the results possible with the DA10-17, and other great FE zooms and primes. The antique Spiratone, Samigon, and other early auxilliary fisheyes are not in that realm. But I'm having fun experimenting with mine -- just like I would tinkering with a wind-up Victrola that can nonetheless sometimes yield surprising results.

Unlike modern fisheye and wideangle conversion lenses, these antiques are more involved than something that only screws onto the filter thread. They have a ring one sets for the size of "normal" lens your camera has, enabling the pairing to produce the full circle fisheye image on the film plane. Like my Samigon, most of them offered settings between 30 and 200mm. They also have their own adjustable aperture iris; as they are meant to be used with the main lens set wide open (and focused on infinity).

None of that means of course that these old auxilliary FEs have to be used according to original directions. What if I don't want a full circle or arcs of a circle on the sides of the image? I experimented with putting the Samigon on the front of my SMC Pentax-A 80-200mm zoom. With the Samigon set for a 30mm main lens and the Pentax zoom set at about 105mm, I appeared to get square corners in the veiwfinder frame. Unfortunately, I still got some vignetting on the right side of images (incidentally I'm shooting from about 4-5 inches from the closest two hazel bush leaves):


I also stopped down the Samigon three stops, one more than the recommended two, in order to get sharper focus at the fringes than I was finding in my first tests. Next I tried setting the Pentax zoom to 135mm, which resulted in square image corners without vignetting on the actual images. Interestingly, some of the images didn't look very fishy. It really took placing something *distortable* near the widest sides for the frame for the result to look more than "ultra-wide" angle. One nice thing about this set-up, and better FEs, is the capability to combine near and far -- here, a dandelion seed head in 4" tall grass shot from inches away seems very close now to the arc of the earth...hee, hee, hee...:


I may shoot some full-circle FE shots on film later today....postable results will be delayed.

[goatsNdonkey]

I now have a Sears (Ricoh?) 50mm f2.0 lens and found that using it as the base lens for the Samigon FE, give me a little more sharpness than using my Sears (Ricoh) 50mm f1.7, though part of the sharpness might come from setting the Samigon's iris a bit smaller than its instructions recommend.

Here's a better combining close-up with far away example than the one I posted earlier...irises in bloom:



Taking this Fish-Eye Fever stuff lying down...literally in the driveway:



Lying down under the cottonwood:



Fish-Eye under the hood:



As posted earlier, I found putting the Samigon on the front of a zoom set at 135mm, with the Samigon set for a 30mm lens, gave me corner-to-corner coverage on my K110D's sensor. Surprisingly, trying it on the front of a 135mm prime lens I just got did not achieve the same result. Well, I'm getting used to round sides, so I guess that's okay.

[cafazucar]

Looking at some of these posts has kinda made me start to regret selling my DA 10-17...
Here's a more humble shot from my Theta instead Taken while visiting Chicago during a long flight layover.

[Jean Poitiers]

A new addition for me ... a DA 10-17.

Here on it's first test run in front of the Mayor's offices ... @ 10mm

[goatsNdonkey]

Hmmm? If mayors around here knew you could have an office like that, they probably wouldn't stick around here much longer.

Update on the old Samigon FE attachment. Put it on a film body for the last couple of shots, and found that it does indeed provide the full circle fish-eye view in the full-frame format, unlike what it does with the cropped sensor of my K110D. I'm looking forward to getting those pics and scans back! One problem though -- where light coming through the viewfinder is supposed to illuminate that camera's light meter display, I only saw the total blackness outside the FE image circle. I had to guestimate the exposures. Ha, ha!

[schnitzer79]

Samyang 8mm

[bariskayhan53]

My new DA 10-17mm
Absolutely great lens

[Jean Poitiers]

More DA 10-17 ... both @ 10mm on K-3 ...

[klaus123]

Hello

I am curious to see DA10-17 Pictures taken with the full frame K1.....

[mattb123]

K-3 & Rokinon 8/3.5

[Racer X 69]

Hello

I am curious to see DA10-17 Pictures taken with the full frame K1.....

Try here: The second shot, wide field astrophotography is one.


And there are many others there.