**Content warning** There is a photo of a decomposing fish head in this set. It’s not particularly gnarly, but if you are sensitive to that kind of thing, you might want to give this post a miss.
The kid and I went down to Chigasaki this past Friday to check out a possible future school for him. Afterwards, I slung my camera over my shoulder and we headed to the nearby beach for him to collect some rocks and try skipping some stones into the water. Anticipating that we might do this, I brought along my new 7.5mm fisheye lens to try out. So this mini shoot represents my first time shooting with an ultra-wide fisheye.
This thing is crazy wide, by the way. The horizontal field of view is something like 190 degrees. If you tilt the camera into portrait mode, it’s very difficult not to catch your feet in the shot.
It wasn’t the best day for a shoot: everything was super grey. A dry overcast day is great if you’re somewhere with a lot of colour— you get great lighting with no harsh shadows— but on a grey beach, with a grey sea… well, you’ll see.
I should mention that a couple of shots in this set were made with my trusty 35mm, which I also brought along. I’ve annotated which ones are which, but you should be able to tell visually. The fisheye lens has a huge amount of barrel distortion (curved edges) compared to the 35mm. (Shooting on a Fuji crop sensor camera, so these focal lengths, given for full frame sensors, are actually 1.5 times higher. So effective focal lengths are actually 11mm and 53mm if you care about this sort of thing.)
You’ll notice that I processed these differently— I didn’t use a single look for all of them. On a paid shoot, I might try to harmonize the looks more, but for an experimental day at the beach, I just went wherever my fancy took me when I processed them.
