I’ve been playing with my new circular fisheye lens for the past few days and am really enjoying the results. I shared one of my earliest photos taken with the lens last week, but I’ve been back to church a few times as I’ve tried to get better results.

One of the things I’ve found is that it’s really difficult to achieve infinite focus on this lens. There’s just so much distortion that when I focus to what should be infinite a lot of the frame ends up out of focus. It took me a bit to figure out that stopping down the aperture would help to reduce the amount of bokeh I’d get ¹. Today I went back into Central’s sanctuary with the lens stopped to around ƒ/11 ², and I was very pleased with the results. With my earlier attempts the stained glass was never well-defined when the photo was captured, with the aperture closed down a bit the panes are much more defined. I’m going to go back some time this week and close the aperture some more, just to see how things change.

Throughout my years here at Central my chosen angle to capture the Sanctuary has been from the back ³. The stained glass window in the front of the Sanctuary is stunning and so it just felt like the best way to show of the space. With the 190 degree viewing angle of this Meke 6.5 mm lens, however, I’ve now changed my mind. Photos I can capture from the front of the sanctuary are just awesome. Here’s my favorited merged image from this afternoon. It’s eight exposures, ranging from 1/13 second all the way up to 13 seconds. I then opened the merged image in Affinity Photo and ran it through Fisheye Hemi. I love the results.