10/11/2011. The ultra wideangle sampler. So there I was, high in the south endzone of Neyland Stadium (section LL, row 11, seat 15 if anyone's counting) with three ultra wideangle lenses and a Canon 5D full-frame DSLR. One lens was a 14mm F2.8 Rokinon rectilinear lens, one was a 16mm F3.5 full-frame fisheye Nikkor with an EOS adapter, and one was a Russian-made 8mm Peleng circular fisheye lens. Pay no attention to the color balance differences; I'm being pretty casual about color while prepping these comparisons. All the Rokinon frames have passed through PT Lens software to remove complex distortion. I used the same program with custom settings to rectify images from the two fisheye lenses. (Note that there's a dead giveaway that the first frame shown has been messed with. The edit doesn't influence the lens's wide-angle performance, but it's obvious once you catch it. Explanation far below.)

 

14mm Rokinon:

 

 

16mm Fisheye Nikkor:

 

 

8mm Peleng Fisheye:

 

 

8mm Peleng Fisheye rectified:

 

 

16mm Full-frame fisheye rectified:

 

 

14mm Rokinon, 3 frames stitched:

 

There you go: several ways to go very, very wide depending upon how much trouble you want to go to in post-processing, how many pixels you need, and whether your subject needs to be shot in a single frame (because, for example, of the need to capture fast action) or if it's practical to construct a multi-exposure panorama. The 8mm image circle is on the order of 3000 pixels across, so any rectified image based on it can be no wider; the 16mm fisheye projection is half again as wide; and this particular stitched panorama is about 8,000 pixels wide (the amount of overlap of the subexposures determines the total width in pixels).

The giveaway that the first photo is not a straight capture: I wanted that sky and that light and that "T" formation from the band, but the light and the sky happened during the 1st quarter, not during pre-game festivities. So I combined two images, but how can you tell? Easy: note that the band is on the field, but it is also in its seats just to te right of the near endzone. Two Pride of the Southland Marching Bands is better than one.

 

And finally, one more from the 14mm Rokinon:

Who's going to tell Amy that's not a big orange?

 

 

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